ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author outlines how cancer patients act, think, and orient themselves based on their lifestyle when encountering a serious illness. She illustrates how different types of care relations between patients and health care professionals are socially and culturally determined. The author shows how the social order that patients encounter in the cancer field is incorporated in professionals as a habitus that operates 'without their knowledge' and which seems to communicate the interests of the dominant experts. She aims to summarize two constructed patient-histories (Peter Jones and Ann Brown) to show some of the objective structures of the different care relations for men and women. Routines of treatment can function as symbolic violence in relation to the patients' existential situation and to the care relations in the field. Authentic relations are those in which the professionals with expertise can meet patients on the patients' terms and share their feelings of fear and chaos.
