HIV Health in Context: Negotiating Medical Technology and Lived Experience

Abstract

Biomedical constructions of health and illness as objective categories have long been challenged by social theorists. As part of this critique, an analytic distinction is made between the domains of doctors and patients to highlight differences in perspective and power. Illness narratives and phenomenological studies foreground how patient experiences and understandings of health are complex, socially embedded and often conflict with medical models. This article, however, asks how patients make sense of their health at the interface of these domains. This question is explored with reference to 16 men living with HIV and the ways in which they negotiate medical discourse and technology in relation to lived experience and, conversely, how they interpret their own bodily symptoms in light of clinical construction of health. These negotiations contest the authority of biomedical definitions, but also reveal a more dynamic and technologically mediated negotiation within patient experience than some phenomenologically oriented theories on health allow.