Disruptive Touch and Accountability

Using multimodal conversation analysis, we investigated a phenomenon in which the organization of physical examination in the medical consultation is disrupted by patients’ embodied displays of pain and withdrawal from the doctor’s touch, and doctors’ practices in managing those withdrawals. Such instances break the organization of the interaction and can thus be seen to encode patients’ disalignment with the ongoing activity. We present how the participants orient to the disalignments as accountable and, with that, restore the organization. The data consist of Finnish general practitioners’ consultations with patients suffering from upper respiratory tract problems.