This book explores how women make meaning at various health flashpoints in their lives, overcoming fear, anxiety, and anger to draw upon self-advocacy, research, and crucial decision-making. Combining focus group research, content analysis, autoethnography, and textual inquiry, the book argues that the making and remaking of what we call “patient epistemologies” is a continual process wherein a health flashpoint—sometimes a new diagnosis, sometimes a reoccurrence or worsening of an existing condition or the progression of a natural process—can cause an individual to be thrust into a discourse community that was not of their own choosing. This study will interest students and scholars of health communication, rhetoric of health and medicine, women’s studies, public health, healthcare policy, philosophy of medicine, medical sociology, and medical humanities.

Proposals for patient-centered care for chronic illness have not understood or incorporated the capacity of patients to be active agents of health and health care. Patients can not only make treatment choices, but help define their clinical problem and its resolution. This book examines patient action as the principal path to health and an essential component of it.

The sixth volume in this series provides: guides for doing qualitative research; analysis of several autobiographies; hints on how to interpret what is not said in narrative interviews; discussion on how cultural meanings and values are transmitted across generations; and illustrations of the transformational power of stories.

This innovative text introduces and illustrates case study methodology for nursing research by exploring how it can be used to uncover the varied and complex life experiences of persons with chronic illness and post-traumatic stress conditions. Nursing practice demands care and compassion, but often nurses do not have the tools to examine their clients' health and wellness experiences. This book presents an approach to finding shared solutions for common health problems from a nursing perspective. It provides readers with the tools to develop their own case study approach and the skills to translate their findings into innovative ways to influence nursing care for people across their health/illness trajectories. Rather than a prescriptive approach to care, it highlights the necessity of understanding what people are feeling, thinking, and doing to enhance health and improve quality of life. This book is an essential read for nursing and qualitative health researchers. It is also an important companion for clinicians and academics concerned with caring for people with chronic illness and post-traumatic stress conditions.

Spirituality and Religion Within the Culture of Medicine provides a comprehensive evaluation of the relationship between spirituality, religion, and medicine evaluating current empirical research and academic scholarship. In Part 1, the book examines the relationship of religion, spirituality, and the practice of medicine by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the most recent empirical research of religion/spirituality within twelve distinct fields of medicine including pediatrics, psychiatry, internal medicine, surgery, palliative care, and medical ethics. Written by leading clinician researchers in their fields, contributors provide case examples and highlight best practices when engaging religion/spirituality within clinical practice. This is the first collection that assesses how the medical context interacts with patient spirituality recognizing crucial differences between contexts from obstetrics and family medicine, to nursing, to gerontology and the ICU. Recognizing the interdisciplinary aspects of spirituality, religion, and health, Part 2 of the book turns to academic scholarship outside the field of medicine to consider cultural dimensions that form clinical practice. Social-scientific, practical, and humanity fields include psychology, sociology, anthropology, law, history, philosophy, and theology. This is the first time in a single volume that readers can reflect on these multi-dimensional, complex issues with contributions from leading scholars. In Part III, the book concludes with a synthesis, identifying the best studies in the field of religion and health, ongoing weaknesses in research, and highlighting what can be confidently believed based on prior studies. The synthesis also considers relations between the empirical literature on religion and health and the theological and religious traditions, discussing places of convergence and tension, as well as remainingopen questions for further reflection and research. This book will provide trainees and clinicians with an introduction to the field of spirituality, religion, and medicine, and its multi-disciplinary approach will give researchers and scholars in the field a critical and up-to-date analysis.

A philosopher who has experienced psychosis argues that recovery requires regaining agency and autonomy within a therapeutic relationship based on mutual trust. In Mental Patient, philosopher Abigail Gosselin uses her personal experiences with psychosis and the process of recovery to explore often overlooked psychiatric ethics. For many people who struggle with psychosis, she argues, psychosis impairs agency and autonomy. She shows how clinicians can help psychiatric patients regain agency and autonomy through a positive therapeutic relationship characterized by mutual trust. Patients, she says, need to take an active role in regaining their agency and autonomy—specifically, by giving testimony, constructing a narrative of their experience to instill meaning, making choices about treatment, and deciding to show up and participate in life activities. Gosselin examines how psychotic experience is medicalized and describes what it is like to be a patient receiving mental health care treatment. In addition to mutual trust, she says, a productive therapeutic relationship requires the clinician’s empathetic understanding of the patient’s experiences and perspective. She also explains why psychotic patients sometimes feel ambivalent about recovery and struggle to stay committed to it. The psychiatric ethics issues she examines include the development of epistemic agency and credibility, epistemic justice, the use of coercion, therapeutic alliance, the significance of choice, and the taking of responsibility. Mental Patient differs from straightforward memoirs of psychiatric illness in that it analyses philosophic issues related to psychosis and recovery, and it differs from other books on psychiatric ethics in that its analyses are drawn from the author’s first-person experiences as a mental patient.

The Collaborative for Palliative Care ("Collaborative") is a grassroots consortium of public and private organizations that came together in 2005 for the purposes of studying the increasing need for palliative care and the methods for such care. It has grown from a small fledgling group to a membership of over 50 community-based organizations and volunteers dedicated to improving care of the seriously ill through education, research and advocacy. The Collaborative bridges policy, research and practice in its initiatives and vision for the future. Partners in Palliative Care examines specific areas of concern that the Collaborative has addressed in its education programs and advocacy, as well as the collaborative processes that have been so successful in building community assets. Areas of concentration have been diverse and include advance care planning, relational communication paradigms, community capacity building, the role of culture and spirituality in palliative care, the meaning of pain and suffering for seriously ill individuals, and the ethics of health care costs in palliative and end-of-life systems of care. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life and Palliative Care.

"The first edition of Communication in Palliative Nursing was published in 2012 and became the market leader for nurses wanting to learn more about how to improve and teach palliative care communication. For the last 8 years, it has remained the only text solely focused on the vital role of nurses in palliative care. During this time, the COMFORT model was taught to nurses nationwide who brought the curriculum back to their own institutions and taught components of the model to more than 10,000 healthcare providers across the United States (Wittenberg, Ferrell, Goldsmith, Ragan, & Buller, 2017). Numerous journal articles and research studies have been produced to highlight the principle components of the COMFORT model and test its effectiveness among healthcare audiences across a variety of clinical and educational settings. Through this all, as the model was disseminated to clinical audiences of bedside nurses, nurse leaders, nursing students, and interprofessional learners, feedback was captured about COMFORT. Comments revealed major components of the model that were working and weren't working for the nurses and other healthcare providers who utilized the strategies with patients and families, and began using curriculum tools for teaching and integrating palliative care communication instruction. So, much like the model's grounding in a transactional communication approach, which relies on the co-created interaction between parties, it was clear that the COMFORT model was also ebbing and flowing and had to change. More importantly, palliative care has been growing, changing, expanding, and becoming more sophisticated, more wide-spread! Now more than ever before, palliative care is provided in the home, clinic, or inpatient setting and serves patients who are seriously or chronically ill and their families. It became evident that in order to continue improvements to the model and to keep up with the changing landscape of palliative care and palliative patient populations, a new edition was necessary. Before we highlight the changes, it is never too early to overstate our steadfast commitment to the following principles: We believe that communication research and theory can shape palliative care practices, providing tools for a variety of contexts. We believe that palliative care, offering compassionate, holistic treatment for patients and their families, will not be possible without caring for the entire person (body and mind). We believe that communicating about palliative care must begin at diagnosis of serious illness, not just at end-stages. We believe in a patient-centered approach to communication that emphasizes the role of the family caregiver in the illness trajectory. We believe that intentional communication emphasizing team processes among physicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains, and other healthcare professionals improves palliative care practice. We believe that palliative care should be introduced early in the communication education of all health professionals. We believe that education about palliative care and communication must extend to patients and families who can then advocate for and partner more productively in such services. We believe that communication with the family caregiver is essential for the treatment of pain and symptom management. We believe that frequent conversations are needed across the disease/care trajectory, as patients and families encounter ongoing points of decision-making"--

Written by the dystonia team at the University of Florida Movement Disorders Center, this book is designed as a practical and complete guide to the integrated management of the dystonia patient. It provides a current understanding of this common but often poorly appreciated condition and a framework for delivering comprehensive multi and intra-disciplinary care. Individual chapters review medical and surgical strategies, botulinum toxin therapy, and programming issues for deep brain stimulators. The remainder of the book is devoted to the important role of health professionals from various disciplines and what the physician needs to know to direct a successful long-term care team for dystonia patients. Features include: Emphasis on a multi-disciplinary team approach to long-term management Coverage of both adult and pediatric patients Pearls and practical points within each chapter to guide the practitioner Lists of resources and referral information for patients, families, and medical teams

Emphasising the multi-disciplinary nature of palliative care, the fourth edition of this text also looks at the individual professional roles that contribute to the best-quality palliative care.