A Conversation Analytic Research on the Relationship among Treatment Regime Delivery Practice, Treatment Content, and Sequential Position

Adopting conversation analysis as its research methodology and taking video recordings and transcriptions of doctor-patient interaction at the urology clinic as its data, this paper investigates the relationship among treatment regime delivery practice, treatment content and its sequential position.It is found that the doctor mainly resorts to three actions, namely pronouncement, suggestion, and offering, to deliver treatment regimes.Pronouncements are the most direct biomedical solution to the patient's problems.Suggestions are supplementary solution or lifestyle interference, and offerings are medication prescribed to ease the patient's symptoms.In terms of its sequential position, pronouncement-formulated treatment regime occurs right after the doctor's explicit diagnosis and embodies the highest degree of deontic right.Suggestion comes after the pronouncement-formatted treatment regime, and offering comes either after good news diagnosis or after the pronouncement and/or suggestion-formulated treatment regime.There exists a normative relationship among the social action that the doctor adopts to deliver a treatment regime, its content and its sequential position.