Body Consciousness in the Healthcare Environment: The Body for Oneself and Other

Abstract

Like the human mind, the human body is the medium by which we represent ourselves, whether we are patients or healthcare providers. This paper concerns the significance of understanding the existential phenomenological side of a patient’s body within healthcare. To care for a patient’s body, one needs to be aware of how the body appears to itself, to others, and in a larger environmental reality. We think and feel and observe the world with our body, especially with the brain and nervous system, but also with other dimensions of the body manifesting itself as a somatic tonus. The healthcare providers’ body does not only represent a profession, but also who they are as a person and what kind of environment by which they are affected. The same applies to patients' bodies. As a medium for experiencing, a medium inseparable from our very being, our physical body functions as a surface open to and in contact with the healthcare environment that surrounds it. In the modern healthcare regime, the human body is nearly always visible and under constant surveillance. In the environment of control and visibility, bodies become medicalized, psychologized, and normalized to fit into sociocultural demands of economic and structural adaptations, social participation and communication, which in certain situations seem hostile to the ideology of care, freedom, and humanity. We should realize that our ethical concepts and norms, even the very notion of humanity, depend on social forms of life involving the ways we experience our bodies in different medical and sociocultural situations.