Addressing life style in primary health care

The problem studied concerns how patients and physicians talk about and make use of information regarding patient life style in the daily practice of primary health care. The study has been carried out at two primary health care centers in central Sweden. Transcribed dialogues between 42 patients and 12 physicians have been used as a data corpus. The analyses concern the interactional patterns in the dialogues between patient and physician, how the interlocutors address life style and for what purposes. The results show a similarity between patients and physicians with respect to the extent to which they use the discourse space. However, salient differences were found in the following way: the physicians not only introduced and closed life style topics more frequently than the patients did, they also used what is referred to as an agenda driven strategy to introduce them. The patients, on the other hand, used an interactively anchored strategy. The patients, by taking the reference in the life world and by making use of the life style topics, present and articulate their identity. The physicians subsume life style issues under a medical framing of the patients' problem and they mainly address life style in order to construe a proto-typical patient rather than an individual.