Literature Review - Annie Marie Mol on environment of care

Mol, A. (2008, July 23). The Logic of Care : Health and the Problem of Patient Choice.

Listening needs to be situated in an environment that is one of enabling and comfort. In the ‘Logic of Care’ Annie Marie Mol explores the environment through her experiences and experiments with diabetic patients. 

She questions the notion of choice in a very fundamental way, which is diametrically opposite to how we (I) view choice. Is it really good to give a choice when there is way to do something that is most beneficial for you not the easy thing but the beneficial one. 

She also highlights the fluidity of the factors that contribute to making a choice, which adds a dimension of impossibility to making a choice. The factors are constantly changing therefore a choice is good as long as the factors that influence it remain the same. 

So she recommends that it’s a continuous dynamic thing and you can choose only for that time and therefore not have the expectation that it will remain the same every time. 

Her Method:

‘Events somehow tend to fit together, there are affinities between them. It resembles

Discourse which means words, materialities and practices hang together is a specific, historical and cultural situated way.

Modes is plural, it invites a comparison of different ways of thinking and acting that co-exist in a single place and time.

Ordering involves continuous effort and that it may always fail.’

“To act without seeking to control. To persist while letting go.”

“Caring professionals” seek to cultivate patients’ minds. We convey insights, ask probing questions, or try to reassure; we “try not just to reflect back what [the patient] thought already. In the hope of making [the patient] more balanced, [we] give counterbalance. [We] encourage [the patient] to take good care of [himself], without feeding the illusion of control.

She concludes that good care is not a matter of making individual choices but is something that grows out of collaborative and continuing attempts to make aware knowledge and technologies to diseased bodies and complex lives.