Asymmetrical Relationship Construction in Medical Interactions - A Case Study of Advice-giving in Mandarin Chinese

A Conversation Analytic Investigation on Expertise Demonstration in Community Pharmacy Interaction

“…On the other hand, the patients were regarded as the non-expert because of their non-access to the professional knowledge. In addition, as demonstrated in the findings (see Extract 2), the pharmacy staff directed the patient's request for information based on the medical knowledge to the pharmacist for the expertise knowledge [10]. Thus, this study indicated that the epistemic asymmetry in the community pharmacy interaction only gives the permission for the pharmacy staff to sell the products, but not providing medical knowledge to the patients.…”

“…After 0.5 sec of silence, the pharmacist orients to the pain stand to show alternative medicines, and P elaborates various types of medicines with detailed explanation and exemplification. Such detailed explanations based on P's higher epistemic knowledge and authority [10] is followed by Pt's lack of knowledge [31] and experience about different medicines for pain (i have never used, i never know). Then, the pharmacist upgrades his expertise demonstrations with references to the Ministry of Health which is an external source of authority [32] and recommends the same alternative medicine (kuromet).…”

“…Conversation Analysis (CA) is performed as a persuasive system of discipline and inquiry to obtain precise details in social interaction and to analyse what the actors of social interaction do and what they achieve in talk-in-interaction [10]. The existing CA literature on the professionals' practices shows how they transfer general knowledge in a contextual manner with various discursive functions.…”