Cultivating Doctors’ Gut Feeling: Experience, Temporality and Politics of Gut Feelings in Family Medicine

• Published in: Culture, medicine and psychiatry Vol. 46; no. 2; pp. 564 - 581
• Main Authors: Kristensen, Benedikte Møller, Andersen, Rikke Sand, Nicholson, Brian David, Ziebland, Sue, Smith, Claire Friedemann
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.06.2022; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Anthropology; Attitude of Health Personnel; Biopolitics; Cancer; Clinical decision making; Clinical medicine; Clinical Psychology; Cultivation; Emotions; Families & family life; Family Practice; Frame analysis; Humans; Litigation; Medical education; Medicine; Original Paper; Perceptions; Physicians; Politics; Professional training; Psychiatry; Public Health; Reasoning; Science; Social Sciences; Sociology; Time; United Kingdom > UK; Denmark; Aarhus Denmark; Clinical reasoning; Politics; Temporality; Place; Gut feeling
• ISSN: 0165-005X; 1573-076X
• DOI: 10.1007/s11013-021-09736-3

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.