ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with patient experience and doctor-patient interactions, topics of enduring concern in medical anthropology and focuses on the critical medical anthropology perspective on the relationship between structure and agency. In allegiance with the perspective, a major sector of the medical social sciences including parts of medical anthropology has taken as its mission the understanding of patients of diverse cultural or class backgrounds so as to arm physicians with a culturally informed bedside manner. Anesthetics and analgesics were administered to control women's experience. The chapter presents when the patient is a woman, as in the two cases, the social control functions of medicine involve reinforcing ideologies concerning women's ability to handle their emotions and to make rational decisions, "ideologies of women's appropriate role in work and the family". In short, while one set of observers of the clinical encounter, what might be termed the "pro-physician group," focuses its attention on the dominating physician and the dominance of biomedicine generally.
