Please Be Patient

A Cultural Phenomenological Study of Haemodialysis and Kidney Transplantation Care

Gunnarson, Martin

2016

This thesis examines the practice of haemodialysis and kidney transplantation, the two medical therapies available for persons with kidney failure, from a phenomenological perspective. A basic assumption made in the thesis is that contemporary biomedicine is deeply embedded in the cultural, historical, economic, and political circumstances provided by the particular local, national, and transnational contexts in which it is practiced. The aim of the thesis is twofold. On the one hand, the aim is to examine the forms of person- and patienthood enacted and negotiated in haemodialysis and kidney transplantation care and in the daily lives of persons with kidney failure. On the other hand, the aim is to investigate the ways in which the enacted and negotiated forms of person- and patienthood are culturally embedded and normatively charged. In order to examine and investigate this twofold aim, an empirical material has been gathered that comprises observations and in-depth interviews with patients and caregivers at four haemodialysis units, one in Riga, Latvia, and three in Stockholm, Sweden. The theoretical approach and methodology of the study is cultural and phenomenological in character, drawing on an ethnological and anthropological understanding of culture as processual and relational, and on a phenomenological understanding of personhood as embodied and intertwined with the surrounding world. The thesis shows that patients’ encounters and attempts to deal with the diagnoses and treatments associated with kidney failure are complex and often misalign them with the normatively charged orientations enacted and recommended by medicine. The complex situation that emerges when they undergo transplantation, for example, stands in stark contrast to the widespread official view of organ transplantation as a self-evidently health-bringing and normalising therapy. Through their repeated and extensive experiences of undergoing haemodialysis and living with the disease, patients eventually become able to create a synthesis between their lived experiences of their own body and their body as a medical object – what in the thesis is called a ‘sick body’ – a synthesis that allows them to reorient themselves in life and experience a sense of direction. This process relies, to a large extent, on the temporal structure that haemodialysis affords life; it is by repeatedly undergoing the treatment that patients become able to create a sick body. Even so, many of them find this temporal structure problematic; they experience it as disruptive of their control and future-orientedness and as causing an existentially difficult-to-handle boredom. The thesis also shows that the political developments and the norms prevalent in the two national contexts studied greatly affect the orientations of the treatment practices and the participants’ lives. In both Riga and Stockholm, ideals of freedom, activity, control, and self-actualisation influence what forms of patienthood and personhood are enacted. The study indicates that persons who fall ill with a serious and chronic disease only gradually become able to understand and actively cope with their differently embodied circumstances of life. This suggests that medical professionals should not too hastily enlist their patients as experts on their own bodies, but rather provide them with the time and support necessary for making repeated attempts at creating and maintaining a life with a sick body.

Lund : Lund University Open Access, 2016. s. 435.

ISBN 978-91-981458-3-0

Södertörn Doctoral Dissertations, 1652-7399; 114

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