Gaining knowledge of the “semiotic clouds” underlying the patient’s bodily conditions is a very difficult task which doctors usually accomplish through their cultural continuity with the universe of sense and experience lived by the people asking for their assistance. These relations move through experiential landscapes, projected across space and time, and are semiotically summarized and translated in the phenomenon of “disease,” the object of healthcare. The patient’s body and its disease are not mere empirical data, but rather epitomes of a web of experiences they are constituted by a multifaceted relationship with life environments. However, geographical distance often includes a cultural remoteness between the two sides of the medical relationship. In other words, the visual representation could be (mis)taken for a real presence, as if the patient were “here and now” before the doctor’s eyes. Seeing the body of the remote patient synchronically represented on the desktop conveys the idea of an actual proximity. These primarily stem from the apparent immediacy of the images transmitted and displayed by IT devices. Despite the benefits of providing medical assistance through an intensive use of e-Health, however, there are potentially serious pitfalls. The essay examines the anthropological, legal, and semiotic implications of a new method for healthcare, precisely, “e-Health.” In many respects, telemedicine constitutes an extraordinary improvement that could solve many of the problems resulting from geographical distance between patients and doctors.
0 kommentar(er)
