Videografias do coração
AUTOR(ES)
Rosana Horio Monteiro
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO
2001
RESUMO
This work aims to answer questions such as how the process of reading and interpreting medical images is constructed and how these images are judged as diagnosis. Working with ethnography, it focuses on a group of cardiologists performing cardiac catheterization to diagnose coronary obstruction in a school hospital in Albany, NY. Combining elements from the social worlds literature and the sociology of medicine, we argue that visual sense data ⎯ just what physicians see when they look at an exam ⎯ are the end product of socially organized procedures of evidence fixation. Although physicians learn how to read and interpret diagnostic images through specific training, improving their skills during medical practice, nothing is more difficult than to know exactly just what they do see. Or in another words, what physicians observe should be grounded in their complex commitments to particular research traditions (their academic background, the institutions they are affiliated, and their field of specialization). We conclude that although physicians learn how to read and interpret images through specific training, improving their skills during their medical practice, the very training and practice happen inside the limits of certain paradigms or schools. Or in another words, what they see is what they learnt to see based on their commitments, links with certain research traditions. These physicians have got during their academic training, in their professional practice in the institution where they work, in their fields of specialization, and as members of different social worlds.
ASSUNTO(S)
medicina social etnologia sociologia do conhecimento
