Cultivating doctors’ gut feeling: Experience, temporality and politics of gut-feelings in family medicine

Benedikte Møller Kristensen, Rikke Sand Andersen*, Brian Nicholson, Sue Ziebland, Claire Friedemann Smith

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

For the past decade, within family medicine there has been a focus on cultivating doctors gut feelings as ‘a way of knowing’ in cancer diagnostics. In this paper, building on interviews with family doctors in Oxford shire, UK we explore the embodied and temporal dimensions of clinical reasoning and how the cultivation of doctors’ gut feelings is related to hierarchies of medical knowledge, professional training, and doctors’ fears of litigation. Also, we suggest that the introduction of gut feeling in clinical practice is an attempt to develop a theory of clinical reasoning that fits the biopolitics of our contemporary. The turn towards predictive medicine and the values introduced by accelerated diagnostic regimes, we conclude, introduce a need for situated and embodied modes of reading bodies. We contribute theoretically by framing our analysis within a sensorial anthropology approach.

Original languageEnglish
JournalCulture, Medicine and Psychiatry
Volume46
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)564-581
ISSN0165-005X
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2022

Keywords

  • Clinical reasoning
  • Gut feeling
  • Place
  • Politics
  • Temporality

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