STRATEGIC INTERCHANGES IN NIGERIAN ONLINE MEDICAL CONSULTATIONS

Abstract

Extant scholarship has revealed more attention devoted to the pragmatics of in-person clinical consultations than that of online medical consultations, leaving undescribed such consultative features as strategic voicing and shared consultative salience that are considered distinctive to online consultative interactions. This study addresses the lacuna by examining the strategic interchanges between doctors and patients in Nigerian online medical consultations with a particular focus on the contexts which define consultations and the pragmatic strategies employed by online doctors in the consultations. Prior's Polyphony theory and Clark's Common Ground theory were adopted as the study's theoretical framework. Fifty (50) interchanges between doctors and patients on Nairaland were purposively sampled for analysis. The sampled interactions centred on malaria, typhoid, menstrual pain, allergic reactions and growth. Only portions relating to patients' complaints and doctors' diagnoses and recommendations were analysed. Regarding common ground, the data revealed a strategic, contextual observance of community co-membership and linguistic co- presence by means of the invocation of real and assumed doctor-patient shared knowledge of Western medical jargons and alternative practice. Concerning Polyphony, the typified social voice indicates doctors' low and high levels of commitment to professional authority, a reenvoicing of patients' therapeutic biography is predominant and personalisation is achieved more as internalisation than externalisation. The study concluded that the analysis demonstrated online consultations' affordances for exchanges of medical information, which is pragmatically assessed to match with participants' interactive designs while doctors' and patients' strategic orientations to technicality and confidentiality sometimes weaken the epistemic base of the practice and reduce its reliability in Nigeria.