A Critical Discourse Analysis For The "Otherness-oriented" Medical Interactions

The White Paper on the Practice of Chinese Doctors,published by Chinese Medical Doctor Association(CMDA)on May 28 th,2015 revealed that around 25.79% of the medical personnel had suffered direct verbal abuse during their work,and 13.07% even been physical offended,according to the investigation results of 2014.The disputes between patients and hospitals kept rising and have become one of the main aspects of social disputes in recent years.Leading Journals as Science,New England Journal of Medicine(NEJM),Chinese Medicine Magazine(CMJ),as well as the authoritative Chinese websites,people.com.cn and DXY.cn for instance,have all reported the doctor-patient violent clashes in China,making it not only the most pressing problem for medical institutions but also people's livelihood.Several researchers abroad have accumulated abundant data about the doctorpatient relations and their conversational interactions,while local studies would mainly prefer to introduce these mature paradigms as the blueprints to analyze cases taken place in China.Typical entry points include the institutional discourses,power asymmetries,common interests and other sociologic factors that could lead to any medical disputes.But we believe that there should also be a psychological perspective for the inspection of this phenomenon with a thrilling power and excavation of the mental journeys of the doctors' and patients' identity cognition,construction and negotiation in their consciousness.The author did extensive field researches in two Shanghai teaching hospitals intending to seek answers for these following questions: Is there any discrepancy of self-role cognition between the front stages and back stages of the two sides? Can these discrepancies mirror the extension of both parties' psychological distance in the interactions? And how to dissect the cognitive “otherness” out of the group consciousness via different methods?In this study,by using Goffman's Dramaturgical theory,the author took the medical interactions as a scene drama whereas the hospital was considered the stage and the doctors and patients as the two troupes,which actually became the audiences of each other.Meanwhile,the cognitive critical discourse analysis presented another perspective of the context formation and development,ways of portraying cognitive settings of the rival,and offered a point-to-plane interpretation of the radical factors for this social phenomenon.