ABSTRACT
In the following transcribed excerpts, drawn from a routine medical interview, a patient repeatedly discloses that “My mom had a stroke.” On three different occasions, over the course of a single medical encounter, the patient invokes his mom’s illness as a significant factor influencing key health behaviors that are eventually discussed: excessive drinking, inadequate exercise and diet, and sleeplessness. However, he does so in the midst of producing other actions: (a) explaining his drinking, (b) offering mild disagreement with the interviewer, a physician’s assistant (PA), and (c) explaining why he does not exercise. In response, despite patient’s repeatedly invoking the serious impact that his mother’s stroke has had on his life and his health, interviewer does not take up these psychosocial matters, nor even minimally acknowledge them. Because the patient presents these serious lifeworld experiences three times, at times quite dramatically, it seems anomalous that the PA does not address them in some way.
