"進診室前,請自拍舌頭照片,謝謝! Please take a picture of your tongue before you enter the consultation room, thank you!": Strategic uses of alternative modalities in Traditional Chinese Medicine consultations.

Research output: Unpublished conference presentation (presented paper, abstract, poster)Conference presentation (not published in journal/proceeding/book)Academic researchpeer-review

Abstract

Medical diagnosis typically draws on a mix of verbal and non-verbal clues, constituting an essential aspect of patient-practitioner communication. Given the emphasis on the whole body in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), this setting provides a rich site to deepen the field’s understanding of embodied forms of communication. Consisting of 1.) smelling the patient’s odor and listening to the patient’s voice, 2.) feeling the strength of the pulse and palpating selected body parts, 3.) speaking i.e. asking questions, and 4.) inspecting physical features such as the skin and nails, the four core tenets of observation practices of TCM directly align with recent calls to consider the entirety of human senses to understand human communication more fully (Pennycook, 2017). The on-going use of masks since the start of the pandemic, coupled with periods of TCM clinic closures in Hong Kong during case surges, has compromised TCM practitioners’ capacity to tap into some essential communicative resources. The resulting limited access to patients’ embodied forms of communication raises questions about practitioners’ strategies for attaining clear pictures of their patients’ symptoms during the atypical circumstances of the pandemic.

As part of a larger study that analyzes observation and interview data from a Hong Kong TCM clinic to identify the linguistic and extra-linguistic details of patient-practitioner alignment, this paper addresses the approaches employed by one of the practitioners and five of her patients to discuss their health concerns during telehealth and in-person consultations. This focus has generated a corpus of key communicative resources, including gestures, haptics, micro and discursive-level linguistic strategies, and humor. As a means of circumventing the constraints imposed by mask wearing at face-to-face consultations and bad connections during telehealth consultations, the practitioner exploits digital tools by requiring all patients to send her photographs of their tongues via WhatsApp prior to consultation. Special attention to these tongue photos in addition to the pitch and intensity of patients’ voices suggests that, with the restricted access to patients’ embodied communication during the atypical circumstances of the pandemic, a heightened role for “alternative modalities” (Kress 2009) has emerged. As loosened pandemic restrictions have marked a return to majority face-to-face consultations, some of these alternative modalities have, nevertheless, remained.

Bucholtz, M. & Hall, K. (2016). Embodied sociolinguistics. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates (pp. 173-197). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Kress, G. (2009). Multimodality. A Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. Routledge.
Pennycook, A. (2017). Posthumanist Applied Linguistics. Routledge, Abington, New York.

Original languageEnglish
Publication statusNot published / presented only - 14 Jul 2024
EventInternational Pragmatics Conference 18 - Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium
Duration: 9 Jul 202314 Jul 2024
Conference number: 18
https://pragmatics.international/page/Brussels2023

Conference

ConferenceInternational Pragmatics Conference 18
Abbreviated titleIPrA
Country/TerritoryBelgium
CityBrussels
Period9/07/2314/07/24
Internet address

Keywords

  • alternative modalities
  • telehealth
  • Traditional Chinese Medicine

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