Medical Humanism, Chronic Illness, and the Body in Pain
Medical Humanism, Chronic Illness, and the Body in Pain

Author: Vinita Agarwal

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1498596460

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Even as life expectancies increase, increasing numbers of people are living with chronic illness and pain than ever before. Long-term self-management of chronic conditions involves negotiating the intersections of personal life choices, community and workplace structures, and family roles. Medical Humanism, Chronic Illness, and the Body in Pain: An Ecology of Wholeness proposes an ecological model of wholeness, which envisions wholeness in the dialogic engagement of the philosophical orientations of the biomedical and traditional medical systems. Vinita Agarwal proposes an integrative premise of being whole through revising the fundamental definitions of humanism, rethinking the self/body/environment, and thereby recognizing alternative ways of organizing knowledge and human experience as this model pushes the intersections of patient-centered care and sustainable health ethics. It is in the spaces of such intersections, Agarwal argues, that we accomplish healing as an integrative relationship of the individual with the multiple cultural logics underlying chronic conditions and the competing medical worldviews of our contemporary landscape. Scholars of communication, health, and medical humanities, along with practitioners working with patients who have chronic conditions, will find this book particularly useful.

Pain as Human Experience
Pain as Human Experience

Author: Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1994-11-14

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780520075122

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"With case studies drawn from anthropological investigations of chronic pain sufferers and pain clinics in the northeastern United States, the authors attempt to invent new ways of writing about this language-resistant human experience. Focused on substantive issues in the study of chronic pain, their work explores the great divide between the culturally shaped language of suffering and the traditional language of medical and psychological theorizing. They argue that the representation of experience in local social worlds is a central challenge to the human sciences and to ethnographic writing, and that meeting that challenge is also crucial to the refiguring of pain in medical discourse and health policy debates. Anthropologists, scholars from the medical social sciences and humanities, and many general readers will be interested in Pain as Human Experience. In addition, behavioral medicine and pain specialists, psychiatrists, and primary care practitioners will find much that is relevant to their work in this book."--Jacket.

Medicine, Rationality and Experience
Medicine, Rationality and Experience

Author: Byron J. Good

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780521425766

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Biomedicine is often thought to provide a scientific account of the human body and of illness. In this view, non-Western and folk medical systems are regarded as systems of 'belief' and subtly discounted. This is an impoverished perspective for understanding illness and healing across cultures, one that neglects many facets of Western medical practice and obscures its kinship with healing in other traditions. Drawing on his research in several American and Middle Eastern medical settings, in this 1993 book Professor Good develops a critical, anthropological account of medical knowledge and practice. He shows how physicians and healers enter and inhabit distinctive worlds of meaning and experience. He explores how stories or illness narratives are joined with bodily experience in shaping and responding to human suffering and argues that moral and aesthetic considerations are present in routine medical practice as in other forms of healing.

Meanings of Pain
Meanings of Pain

Author: Simon van Rysewyk

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-07

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 3319490222

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Although pain is widely recognized by clinicians and researchers as an experience, pain is always felt in a patient-specific way rather than experienced for what it objectively is, making perceived meaning important in the study of pain. The book contributors explain why meaning is important in the way that pain is felt and promote the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods to study meanings of pain. For the first time in a book, the study of the meanings of pain is given the attention it deserves. All pain research and medicine inevitably have to negotiate how pain is perceived, how meanings of pain can be described within the fabric of a person’s life and neurophysiology, what factors mediate them, how they interact and change over time, and how the relationship between patient, researcher, and clinician might be understood in terms of meaning. Though meanings of pain are not intensively studied in contemporary pain research or thoroughly described as part of clinical assessment, no pain researcher or clinician can avoid asking questions about how pain is perceived or the types of data and scientific methods relevant in discovering the answers.

Encountering Pain
Encountering Pain

Author: Deborah Padfield

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2021-02-15

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 1787352633

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What is persistent pain? How do we communicate pain, not only in words but in visual images and gesture? How do we respond to the pain of another, and can we do it better? Can explaining how pain works help us handle it? This unique compilation of voices addresses these and bigger questions. Defined as having lasted over three months, persistent pain changes the brain and nervous system so pain no longer warns of danger: it seems to be a fault in the system. It is a major cause of disability globally, but it remains difficult to communicate, a problem both to those with pain and those who try to help. Language struggles to bridge the gap, and it raises ethical challenges in its management unlike those of other common conditions. Encountering Pain shares leading research into the potential value of visual images and non-verbal forms of communication as means of improving clinician–patient interaction. It is divided into four sections: hearing, seeing, speaking, and a final series of contributions on the future for persistent pain. The chapters are accompanied by vivid photographs co-created with those who live with pain. The volume integrates the voices of leading scientists, academics and contemporary artists with poetry and poignant personal testimonies to provide a manual for understanding the meanings of pain, for healthcare professionals, pain patients, students, academics and artists. The voices and experiences of those living with pain are central, providing tools for discussion and future research, shifting register between creative, academic and personal contributions from diverse cultures and weaving them together to offer new understanding, knowledge and hope.

Coaching for Person-Centred Healthcare
Coaching for Person-Centred Healthcare

Author: Elaine Cook

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-31

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1040121675

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This guide introduces a humanistic, solution-focused coaching model, using lived experience to demonstrate how profound changes in our healthcare experiences and system, for patients and staff, are possible; while also supporting readers to develop their own coaching skills. Combining research, theory, and practice shared through personal experience, readers are introduced to solution-focused, dialogic tools for use in promoting person-centred care. The first section of the book introduces the coaching model and explores its theoretical and philosophical underpinnings, drawing on theories from neuroscience, neurobiology, communication sciences, humanistic psychology, and positive psychology. The second section of the book transitions from theory and research into clinical practice, making evident the broad range of healthcare contexts and domains in which the humanistic, solution-focused approaches are implemented, as well as the profound personal and professional implications associated with their use. The third section of the book focuses on the lived experience of four people, focusing on their interactions with healthcare before and after their coaching training, emphasizing the difference a humanistic, solution-focused approach has made for them and their families. The final section then turns to organizational change and explores how solution-focused coaching provides insights, perspectives, and aspirations for system change. This engaging text is ideal reading for healthcare professionals, teachers, and leaders looking to develop and improve the care they deliver, the experiences of the people they are working with, and the organizations they deliver it within.

Body Talk in the Medical Humanities
Body Talk in the Medical Humanities

Author: Jennifer Patterson

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020-04

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 9781527546219

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This exciting book draws on the insight and experience of 21 medical practitioners and researchers in the wider field of the medical humanities to ask fundamental questions related to illness, bodily experience, the experience and role of medical and healthcare professionals, and the contribution of language and communication to enable understanding. It opens up a range of conversations, reflections and research to present an innovative approach to the field of body studies, investigating complex questions that are associated with self and body and medical and healthcare professionals who work with bodies that are ill. Areas of pain, disability, vulnerability, life experienced through chronic conditions and the insights of listening to the ill and the dying are examined within the individual contributions. The chapters explore a range of key spaces, gaps and tensions between talk and bodies, from embodied experiences and patient-doctor relationships to negotiating institutional constraints and reading, looking and enacting as methods of improving intersubjective, relational and ethical practices.

Health Communication for Social Justice
Health Communication for Social Justice

Author: Vinita Agarwal

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-24

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 1003801773

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This textbook combines whole person and social justice perspectives to educate students on the role of communication in promoting inclusive and person-centered healthcare practices. This book explores health inequities experienced by disadvantaged and marginalized populations and outlines the actions students can take to address these challenges. The book demonstrates how physical, mental, and emotional health is connected to equitable understandings of individual, community, and environmental health. It considers how social, interpersonal, and systemic factors such as personal relationships, language, literacy, religion, technology, and the environment affect health equity. To present strategies and invite action to support the goals of the whole person, social justice activist approach, the book provides contemporary examples, interviews with communication scholars, and case studies that examine local communities and the everyday contexts of health meaning making. This textbook serves as a core or supplemental text for graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses in health communication. Online resources include PowerPoint slides and an instructor manual containing sample syllabi, assignments, and test questions. They are available online at www.routledge.com/9781032081038.

Mental Health among Higher Education Faculty, Administrators, and Graduate Students
Mental Health among Higher Education Faculty, Administrators, and Graduate Students

Author: Teresa Heinz Housel

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-09-23

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1793630259

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Mental Health among Higher Education Faculty, Administrators, and Graduate Studentsaddresses how many academics who experience mental distress or mental illness are afraid to speak out because of cultural stigma and fears of career repercussions. Many academics’ reluctance to publicly disclose their struggles complicates attempts to understand their experiences through research or popular media, or to develop targeted mental health resources and institutional policies. This volume builds on the existing studies in this greatly under-researched area of mental health among faculty, administrators, and graduate students in higher education. The chapters’ research findings will help institutions communicate about mental health in culturally-competent and person-centered ways; create work environments conducive to mental well-being; and support their academic employees who have mental health challenges. This book argues that discussions of health and wellness, equity, workload expectations and productivity, and campus diversity must also cover chronic illness and disability, which include mental health and mental illness.

The Ethos of Black Motherhood in America
The Ethos of Black Motherhood in America

Author: Kimberly C. Harper

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-10-27

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1793601437

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The Ethos of Black Motherhood in America: Only White Women Get Pregnant examines the ethos of Black and white mothers in America's racialized society. Kimberly C. Harper argues that the current Black maternal health crisis is not a new one, but an existing one rooted in the disregard for Black wombs dating back to America's history with chattel slavery. Examining the reproductive laws that controlled the reproductive experiences of black women, Harper provides a fresh insight into the “bad black mother” trope that Black feminist scholars have theorized and argues that the controlling images of black motherhood are a creation of the American nation-state. In addition to a discussion of black motherhood, Harper also explores the image of white motherhood as the center of the landscape of motherhood. Scholars of communication, gender studies, women’s studies, history, and race studies will find this book particularly useful.