Factish relations: Affective bodies in diabetes treatment

Chronic diseases pose a major challenge to contemporary western healthcare systems, and consequently there are numerous initiatives designed to meet these challenges. Patient empowerment is considered to be extremely important in chronic disease management. But what does it mean to become an 'active patient', managing a condition? This article argues that people are always active in shaping their agency and the agency of numerous others, and that we need to attend to these processes of configuration in order to better understand and conceptualize the problem of chronic disease management. This article analyses the daily practices of people with Type 2 Diabetes, with the use of what is described as the 'sociology of attachment' in the field of science and technology studies. The implications of seeing and analysing chronic conditions in this manner are that determinist understandings of chronic conditions are challenged. Accordingly, an experimental and constructive attitude towards the production and assembling of the chronically ill body is enabled. Such an attitude holds that relations with multiple other bodies and entities, such as technologies, the disease, medication and so on continuously and relentlessly affect how the condition unfolds and consequently, the room for interventional strategies and transformation of the chronically ill body is enlarged.