Gown Dynamics

I’m filming a set of interviews with cancer patients, and there are a couple of common themes that are developing. One of the biggest ones has to be the alteration in interpersonal power dynamics that occurs when one person is dressed in ordinary clothes and the other is wearing a paper gown that almost, but not quite, ties in the back.

The problem, which seems fairly obvious to an outside observer, is that it’s difficult to feel like you’ve got an equal part in your own health care decisions when your butt is hanging out in the breeze.

For some of the folks, the solution was to ask if they could just sit down in a consulting room and chat with the doc about their procedures and decisions, before going through the whole change of clothes and doing the rest of the examination. But I think that ignores a potentially great source of new experimental data… Split the patients and docs into four groups, dress half of each group in gowns, the other half in street clothes and pair them off as follows:

I’d be interested in seeing the changes that the doctor / patient relationship undergoes in the group where the patient is fully clothed and the doc has the gap-back paper sack…