In Dawn O. Raithwaite’s “Viewing Persons with Disabilities as a Culture” article, the author discusses health communication between ablebodied person and persons with disabilities and points out the issues that arise in the communication process. Raithwaite writes about the origin of cultural communication and how it affects people who were born with a disability, became disabled, or people who come into interactions with those who have disabilities. The author presents research findings from a series of interviews and shows issues that arise on both sides of ablebodied as well as disabled cultures.
Raithwaite starts his paper with a couple of good examples that indicate how people with disabilities are treated differently and what kind of unpleasant situations can arise if disabled persons are stereotyped. The author provides a brief statistic of disabled persons in U.S. culture and reasons for increase in their population. He writes his paper in 3 parts: first, he describes how the issues originate, signs and the reasons for discomfort for both parties in both verbal and non-verbal communication process; he points out how helping a disabled person (just because he/she is disabled) could cause a conflict, as well as how the language itself used in the communication process could cause awkward moments.
Second, the author points out the problems of the research and how vague and biased the results are, since most of researches are conducted on ablebodies playing roles of people with disabilities. He describes the lack of reality when such researches are conducted since the research is staged and acted by people with no disabilities. The author points out the importance of doing the research and talking directly to a person with a disability, whi ...