Abstract:

The interpretation of diseases is often in a black box, which forms a huge gap with the need for the understanding of diseases among the public. The prognostic knowledge of cancer is related to the disease progression and future life of patients, but few people understand its production and social basis, and only regard it as a technical system based on biomedical principles. It is undeniable that prognostic knowledge relies on molecular-level medical evidence and a set of scientific survival indicator systems to indicate results based on follow-up surveys of a large number of patients and data from clinical trials. However, highly technical prognostic knowledge not only faces the uncertainty in the clinical world, but also becomes highly contextualized by being challenged by the logic of patients’ everyday-life knowledge. In the process of diagnosis and treatment, technologically constructed prognostic knowledge is often revised and selected by clinical experience and patients’ daily practice, realizing the result of knowledge reconstruction from technology-oriented to patient-oriented. Based on the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer, this paper outlines the connotation of prognostic knowledge in medicine and the meaning of patients’ reinterpretation of seemingly definite authoritative knowledge and propose that patient groups should move from “determined life” to “life self-determination” in the understanding of prognostic knowledge.

Key words: prognostic knowledge, constructivism, subjectivity, breast cancer