Care and the Potential of Genetic Counseling: A Clinical Fieldwork

Abstract: Recent decades have witnessed an innovation in genetics and biomedical practices, shifting the practice from treatment to prevention. Testing healthy individuals for genetic inherited diseases has now become increasingly common, preventing potential disease by offering early screenings, medication, or potentially surgery, reducing the genetic risk from developing into disease. Though, social scientists have raised concerns over how this technology of testing individuals will be utilized in healthcare and how at-risk individuals understand their new health condition, calling for a caring practice of genetic tested individuals. Conducting fieldwork in a counseling clinic in Denmark, this thesis yields insights in the caring practice of genetic counseling. Firstly, due to genetic tested patients’ potential imaginations of being either sick or destined to be sick, a symbolic management of the clinic’s interior disentangling its practice with disease is critical, generating a clinic of non-sickness. Meeting patients’ needs is additionally emphasized as vital. This is articulated as ‘meeting the patient where he/she is’ constituting a caring practice which analyzes, measures, and evaluates counselee’s social, bodily, and emotional needs. This caring practice, however, is challenged during telecare consultations, especially without a visual sense of counselees, making it difficult to hear and see the ‘unspoken’ needs.