Virginia Teas Gill
Patient "Demand" for Medical Interventions: Exerting Pressure for an Offer in a Primary Care Clinic Visit
Virginia Teas Gill (Ph.D., Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Illinois State University. Her research focuses on interaction in medical settings. Her major interest is how patients shape aspects of medical encounters by offering their own perspectives on illness and by exerting pressure for particular outcomes.
She has studied the delivery and receipt of diagnostic news in a clinic for childhood developmental disabilities, focusing on the strategies parents use to resist labels (e.g., "learning disabled") for their children and the ways in which clinicians persuade parents to accept labels. In primary care settings, she examines how patients offer their own explanations for illness, how physicians respond to lay explanations, and how patients pursue responses and provide evidence for or against particular explanations. She is also interested in the ways in which patients make requests for medical interventions in clinic visits, especially subtle practices for soliciting offers and applying pressure for interventions such as diagnostic tests.
