Monica Consolandi
Visiting doctoral student (Oct-Dec, 2021)
Monica Consolandi is a Ph.D. Student in ‘Philosophical Issues in an International Perspective’ at University Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Department of Philosophy, Milan. Her research interests focus on doctor-patient interaction and scientific communication. She previously graduated in ‘Philosophy and Languages of Modernity’ at University of Trento with the thesis “The language of conscientious objection.
Her Ph.D. thesis, “Scientific communication and health. Fostering trust in doctor-patient and doctor-public interaction”, investigates doctor-patient communication as a delicate moment of information exchange. One of the two speakers, the patient, also embodies the matter of discourse: this makes the relationship different from everyone else and the information sensitive. Communication could be healing and harmful, depending on the awareness of its power and the skills of the speakers to manage it. In this framework, how could a doctor take care of the patient’s vulnerability with language? Is it possible to strengthen the therapeutic alliance communicating? To answer to these questions, the research protocol COMMUNI.CARE, approved by the Hospital San Raffaele Ethics Committee, studies doctor-patient communication at the moment of a bad diagnosis using ethnographic methods and semi-structured interviews with patients to highlight common misunderstandings and gaps taking place at the very beginning of a relationship to be built. The dramatic Covid-19 outbreak spread inevitably affected the overall project, giving the occasion to reflect on doctor-public communication and the role of physicians in conveying information to a large public of non-experts.
