Address
2700 Bancroft Way
Berkeley
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94704
United States
We are starting something new! Come to the Berkeley Free House for an informal pub chat with one of our visiting scholars this Thursday.
Julie Christina Grew
Wireless ICD Patients and their Doubles
Telecare technologies used for monitoring patients with chronic diseases create what has been referred to as ‘the wireless patient’ (May et al. 2005). By following a number of patients through hospitalization, implantation, in-clinic follow-up, and wireless home monitoring I show that the ICD patient is enacted in multiple ways: a number of doubles are being created. These doubles are not just passive copies, but models that stand in for the patient, simulating the embodied, biographical patient in clinical interactions. What appears as the authentic patient shifts: in some encounters authenticity appears in the person standing in front of the clinician, in others it appears in the ICD. I seek to address the confusions and complexities associated with the wireless patient, pointing out how wirelessness contests the notion of the patient as an embodied, biographical person and how it may create tensions in the doctor-patient relationship.