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The doctor poses questions which elicit specific medical information, and the patient responds with little elaboration—unless requested to do so by the doctor. Excerpt 8 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 DR 5 PT 28 DR 5 PT28 DR 5 PT 28 Okay. Do you have any history of any heart trouble. No. Okay. Have you ever had hepatitis or yellow jaundice. No. Okay. No kidney trouble that you're aware of. Nnnnot what uh well I had kidney infection here in fact in uh, before DR 5 Just before you came in, that's right.

In other words, it is not that a moral or sacred trust is being broken when activities are breached in this way but, rather, that social organization disintegrates because the sense of what kind of event is unfolding starts to break down. These "rules" allow us to recognize activities in terms of discernible patterns—though patterns of social activity are usually not consciously perceived by participants until there is some breach. " Because the fabric of social interaction is so finely woven, and so automatic, to get an understanding of it requires very close attention to the details.

I now turn to this phenomenon in some detail to complete this chapter's discussion of the organization of talk in the adjuvant therapy encounter and the ways in which information is managed by the oncologists in this institutional setting. 6 Resistance to Troubles-Telling: Orientation to a Service Encounter As noted thus far, these oncology visits are organized as task- or agendabased interactions in which the physician invokes a preferred order of events to manage the release of information. This agenda-based organization is one aspect of how these oncology visits are constructed as institutional service encounters.