Concluding lessons/takeaways for practitioners
The complexity of perspective that a diffractive, cultural humility framework invites is both potentially daunting to grasp and yet promising in its ability to broaden and deepen understandings of technologised patient-caregiver experiences and health-care exchanges. As a means of moving forward from the grasp of epistemological paralysis, we propose the following steps: Our framework encourages health practitioners (including researchers) to preserve ambiguity and contingency as productive of reflexive research and clinical practices. It encourages the slowing down of efforts to seek immediate epistemological certainty. Moreover, our framework invites opportunity for the health practitioner to pay granular analytical attention to the here and now problematics germane to contemporary health care delivery. In other words, if we can imagine evaluative practices as analogous to our embodied maps, we can consider how vital the clinical assessment is as a diffractive recording of what has been emphasised in the health-care exchange and as consequence, allowed for or bracketed from consideration. Engagements such as risk management and assessment, treatment planning, and evaluation of patient’s drug adherence are not grappled with analytically or ethically as stable fixed objects independent of the contingencies of scientific practices and their social-psychical health worlds, but as discursive-material phenomena that emerge differently and continuously within the complex relational fields of the clinical exchange. In other words, health practices, including how diagnosis and interventions are embodied and lived by patients, and the power relations that shape them are understood to have relational affects. Viewing culturally humble practice this way invites an opportunity to engage clinical inquiry and assessment as a deeply ethical practice29 that attends to the forms of patient and clinician accountability and responsibility emergent in the clinical encounter