Potential for Intercultural Conflict 12
doctor-patient relationship, physicians develop social control strategies in order to
maintain their position of authority.
In addition to sharing power in the interaction, the decision-making model
characterizing the holistic medical encounters most closely resembled the mutual
participation relationship described by Szasz and Hollender (1956). In this type of
relationship, the client is treated as a full partner in the management of his/her own
health, and the practitioner helps the client to help him/herself. Further, unlike typical
biomedical contexts and literature (Schreiber, 1997), patient compliance was not a major
concern. Beisecker (1990) points out that noncompliance may be constructive in that it
gives people a way to assert their independence and power and allows people to modify
standardized treatment plans to suit their own bodies and needs.
Although the type of relationship between biomedical practitioners and their
patients can range from authoritarian to cooperative, it is not uncommon for biomedical
practitioners to administer treatment or act upon patients, so that the doctor is in a
position of power and control. Biomedical knowledge and technology is
comprehensible and accessible to a limited number of people, which itself creates
distance between the physician and patient. Cline and McKenzie (1998) argue that even
when biomedical physicians and patients operate out of participative decision making
models, patients have less power and are more likely to accept passive roles due to the
fact that they come to the relationship out of need and that physicians control the
resources to address this need. Furthermore, “the patient must not only enter a foreign
conceptual landscape... but she or he must usually meet the doctor in the doctor’s own
physical location” (Bates, 2002, p. 21).
Convention