‘A good fit?’
relatively underutilized in sociological research
on health and illness [33] . Effective links must
also be made between research and ‘real
world’ clinical encounters to allow the research
findings to be fed back into professional
practice (for example through podiatrist
training or the design of practical tools for use
in consultation).
Future research would benefit from looking
more specifically at how elements of ‘brief MI’
might be adopted in practice to help achieve
behavioral change, and from continuing to look
beyond the clinical encounter at the wider role
of shoes in people’s everyday, embodied lives. In
wider research around patient compliance to
treatment, conversation analysis has frequently
been used to explore micro-level interaction
within clinical encounters [29, 34] . However, the
clinical encounter is merely a ‘moment’ and
healthcare research moving forward can
usefully draw theoretically on sociological
approaches such as symbolic interactionism
to explore lived experiences; i.e. what people
do after their appointment, rather than what
they might say they will do during a clinical
encounter. This is important when there may
be discrepancies in what patients commit to
in clinical encounters and what they actually
do in their everyday lives outside the patient-
practitioner interaction. Symbolic interaction
encourages a focus on people’s everyday
embodied practices beyond the medical context
and how such practices construct particular
aged, classed and gendered subjects [35] .
Furthermore, despite the prevalence of foot pain
in the UK [5] , only 4% of the UK population are
currently accessing Podiatry Services. Research
that goes beyond analyzing interaction in the
clinical setting and explores the centrality of
shoes to both the wider public as well as those
receiving treatment has the potential to enhance
the preventative role of Podiatry Services and
improve public education [26] .
With the current climate of NHS cost-
cutting and austerity and increasing shifts
towards self-care and managing conditions
through everyday lifestyle changes under a
"Although there is further research to be done...the
findings of a range of previous research suggest that
tools such as Motivational Interviewing (MI) are likely
to be of value in clinical settings"
Current Pedorthics | September/October 2018
35