ABSTRACT
Mainstream biomedicine maintains the ideal of a dichotomous distinction between the medical symptom and the medical sign.1“4 While the former is a “subjective” matter, experienced and communicated by the patient (such as “pain in the neck”), the latter are assumed to be “objective” find ings, observable by the doctor (for example “decreased mobility in the hip joint”). When the health care system operates in what Chinen calls the representational mode of medical understanding,5 this dichotomy is emphasized, and symptoms are considered as secondary subjective reflec tions of an underlying objective reality. According to Foucault, medical signs are considered as objective facts, observable by the authority of the medical gaze.1 The diagnosis - the name of the disease, which usually will explain the origin of the symptoms - is supposed to emerge as a fact which is discovered by the doctor when the puzzle of symptoms and signs has been sorted out and deciphered.5,6
-k^L Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 20: 275-286, 1999. f T © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
