BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES - Universitatea de Medicină şi Farmacie

(4)Objectivity and emotional neutrality /do not adjudicate the
patient or make them closer than it is requested by the principles of
objectivity/.
Parsons mention the idea of asymmetric physician dominance in
relation with sick person. The features of this dominance are following:
1. Higher status and power;
2. Professional prestige;
3. Situational physician authority, a monopoly over what the
patient wants: since demand exceeds supply;
4. Physician is advantageous because the patient has to come to
him;
5. Situational dependency to receive medical care, the patient has
to consent to condition prescribed by physician.
Thus, the role of doctor is an active but the role of patient is
passive one.
Talcott Parsons have a great contribution in analyses of doctorpatient
relationships as a relation of roles. Firstly because creates an
original conception on it and secondly because his conception stimulates
other sociologists to formulate different approaches to the doctor- patient
relation, essentially via criticism to this original conception. The main
these approaches being exposed below.
Thus, Hafferty (1988) accuses Parson of having been overly
optimistic about the success of physician socialization to universalism and
affective-neutrality. Physicians often react negatively to dying patients,
patients they do not like, and patients they believe are complainers.
Physicians also are subject to personal financial and personal interests in
patient care. Kelly (1987) considers that while the basic notion that norms
and social roles influence illness and doctoring has remained robust, there
have been numerous qualifications to the particular elements that Parsons
attributed to the patient-physician role relationship. For instance,
physicians and the public consider some illnesses in the West and in other
societies to be the responsibility of the ill, such as lung cancer, AIDS and
obesity, making it more difficult for them to be normatively reintegrated
into society. Physicians and other providers react less favorably to patients
who are held responsible for their illness than to "innocent" patients.
Another weakness of Parsons' description is that it was specific to
acute illness, and did not speak to the increasingly prevalent chronic
illnesses and disabilities, a sick role which is permanent and not
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