Women's Health Trajectories: Between Self-Reliance and Organized Healthcare

A 2010 study conducted in Paris, France, revealed how women navigate within a highly organized – yet difficult to comprehend – healthcare system, both striving to transform public health messages into  health-inducing acts, and relying on state-sponsored healthcare priorities specifically linked to gender (perinatal care, breast cancer screening).

The women interviewed strongly relied on themselves to create global health trajectories, and not simply healthcare trajectories, encompassing past family habits when they considered them useful to their health, but also discarding family histories of ill-treatment to save themselves through the consolidation of their health.  Health trajectories thus appear as a vector of self-discovery and subjectivity.

However, health is also a relationship to healthcare professionals and healthcare structures. This is the second key aspect of this study: women demand a personalized relationship with physicians, which goes beyond protocolized treatment schemes. As Pilnick and Dingwall (2011) have shown, though, women don’t challenge the asymmetrical nature of patient-physician interaction. The physician’s expert knowledge is sought and valued as such, but women concurrently ask that their profane, personal, body-anchored, knowledge of their health or ill-health be taken into account by their physicians.

We will thus show that women are forceful actors in the determination of their health patterns, relying on their own resources, while tapping into a highly sophisticated biomedical system into which they strive – on an individual level – to promote a more personalized patient-physician relationship attuned to the experiences of their own, singular, bodies.