This study investigates how pain and bodily discomfort are expressed, interpreted, and negotiated in healthcare interactions. It focuses on English-medium and Chinese-medium consultations in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) clinics in Belgium, examining how patients and healthcare practitioners use linguistic, embodied, and culturally situated resources to make subjective bodily experiences understandable and clinically actionable.
This study proposes the following questions:
1. How do patients in TCM clinics in Belgium describe pain and bodily discomfort in English and Chinese?
2. What linguistic, cultural, and multimodal factors can be observed in these pain expressions and bodily discomfort across English and Chinese?
3. How are meanings of pain and bodily discomfort interactionally co-constructed between patients and practitioners in TCM consultations?
4. What communicative insights do these consultations offer for understanding pain and bodily discomfort communication in multilingual healthcare settings?
The data will be analysed using qualitative discourse, interactional, thematic, and multimodal approaches. Particular attention will be paid to pain descriptions, embodied demonstrations, questioning and clarification practices, practitioner reformulations, metaphor, language choice, and the negotiation of TCM and biomedical understandings. By comparing communicative practices across English-medium and Chinese-medium encounters, the project aims to contribute to research on multilingual healthcare communication, pain discourse, intercultural interaction, and patient-centred care.