Physicians' private clinics in a Northern Thai town--patient-healer "collaboration" and the shape of biomedical practice.

Physicians' private clinics in small Northern Thai towns offer the patient the services of official biomedicine's most sophisticated clinical talent, and the physicians themselves an opportunity to significantly supplement their incomes. The clinic form, while familiar to Westerners and Japanese, has been adapted to the Northern Thai medical environment and Northern Thai notions of the therapeutic process. Because of sociocultural constraints and the pressure of the plural medical environment, physicians' private clinics result in a "collaboration" between patient and practitioner in which some prerogatives of each are compromised and others upheld to shape a clinical institution that satisfies the needs of each. This paper discusses three private clinics in a small Northern Thai town from the perspectives of the physicians and the patients, and then describes the "collaboration" that shapes practices within the clinics.