Pain. Chronic digestive symptoms. Poor sleep. Neuropathy. Sensory disturbances. Fatigue. Panic. Constant illness and discomfort. Frequent difficulty coping with work, school, relationships. Despite the common experience of being told that it’s all in their heads, that they’re just making themselves sick, individuals with these symptoms are experiencing a very real, sometimes debilitating, illness phenomenon. But what is it? Physical or mental illness? Political or social identity? Cultural, narrative, or discursive construction? When something goes awry at the intersection of mind and body – the psychosomatic – what is happening? Widely recognized, yet difficult to classify, diagnose, treat, and explain, psychosomatic disorders are heavily stigmatized, and the associated syndromes have become the site of controversy and antipathy in the provider–patient relationship. In popular culture, terms such as medically unexplained symptoms, hysteria, neurasthenia, hypochondria, functional illness, and malingering are misunderstood, unknown, or rejected outright. Meanwhile, perspectives from cultural and textual studies focus on the psychosomatic as a metaphor in art, literature, and popular media, where disruptions of the body and mind are regularly made to stand in for individual alienation and cultural malaise. Bringing together multiple perspectives, this challenging volume tackles causes, and innovative, humanistic solutions, to conflicts in the provider–patient relationship; uses the psychosomatic as a lens for theorizing the self in culture; and examines the metaphorical potential of the psychosomatic in fictional narrative. Providing a unique assemblage of interdisciplinary, international approaches to understanding the problem of the psychosomatic in both expert and lay discourses, this pioneering edited collection is aimed at students and researchers of health, popular culture, and the health care humanities.

This book explains how narrative medicine can improve evidence based medicine (EBM), making it more effective and efficient, giving patients better quality of life and offering more satisfaction to all health care providers. It discusses not only the disease experienced by the person who is ill, but also focuses on the context and the culture, and investigates how narrative medicine can make other disciplines around the globe more applicable, less manipulative, and more “scientific”. Only by integrating the narrative aspects, can EBM become more effective and efficient, with fewer uncured patients, more satisfied patients with a better quality of life, and satisfaction for all health care providers. Every chapter is divided into two main sections: the first presents the latest research in the field, with comments and interviews with experts, while the second section provides a list of practical exercises and tasks. The book is intended for anyone with an interest in caring for and curing patients: all care providers of care, physicians, general practitioners, specialists nurses, psychotherapists, counselors, social workers, providers of aid, healthcare managers, scientific societies, academics and researchers.

The Routledge Handbook of Health and Media provides an extensive review and exploration of the myriad ways that health and media function as a symbiotic partnership that profoundly influences contemporary societies. A unique and significant volume in an expanding pedagogical field, this diverse collection of international, original, and interdisciplinary essays goes beyond issues of representation to engage in scholarly conversations about the web of networks that inextricably bind media and health to each other. Divided into sections on film, television, animation, photography, comics, advertising, social media, and print journalism, each chapter begins with a concrete text or texts, using it to raise more general and more theoretical issues about the medium in question. As such, this Handbook defines, expands, and illuminates the role that the humanities and arts play in the education and practice of healthcare professionals and in our understanding of health, illness, and disability. The Routledge Handbook of Health and Media is an invaluable reference for academics, students and health professionals engaged with cultural issues in media and medicine, popular representations of disease and disability, and the patient/professional health care encounter.

Redefining Disability features all disabled authors and creators. By combining traditional academic works with personal reflections, graphic art, and poetry, the volume centers disability by drawing from the experiences and expertise of disabled individuals.

This collection of essays explores the rise of scientific medicine and its impact on Victorian popular culture. Chapters include an examination of Charles Dickens's involvement with hospital funding, concerns over milk purity and the theatrical portrayal of drug addiction, plus a whole section devoted to the representation of medicine in crime fiction. This is an interdisciplinary study involving public health, cultural studies, the history of medicine, literature and the theatre, providing new insights into Victorian culture and society.

Primary care, grounded in the provision of continuous comprehensive person-centred care, is of paramount importance in the delivery of accessible and effective health care around the world. The central notion of person-centred care, however, relies on often-unexamined concepts of self, or understandings of what it means to be a person and an agent. This cutting-edge book explores contemporary pressures on the sense of self for both patient and health professional within a consultation and argues that building new concepts of the self is essential if we are to reinvigorate the central tenets of person-centred primary care. Contemporary trends such as shared decision-making between health professionals and patients and promoting self-management assume those involved are able to make their own decisions and take action. In practice, however, medicine often opts for reductionist perspectives of patients as passive mechanical systems and diseases as puzzles. At the same time, huge political and organisational changes mean time and resources are scarce, putting further pressure on consultations. This book discusses how we can start to resolve these tensions. The first part considers problems posed by the increasing bureaucratisation of primary care, the impact of information technology in the consultation, the effects of chronic disease on our sense of self and how an emphasis on biology over biography leads to over-diagnosis. The second part proposes solutions based on a strong ontology of consciousness, concepts of creative capacity, coherence and engagement, and will show how these can enhance the self-esteem of patients and doctors and benefit their therapeutic dialogue. Combining theoretical perspectives from philosophy, sociology and healthcare research with insights drawn from clinical practice, this edited volume is suitable for those researching and studying primary healthcare, communication and relationships in healthcare and the medical humanities.

This volume showcases emerging interdisciplinary scholarship that captures the complex ways in which biological knowledge is testing the nature and structure of legal personhood. Key questions include: What do the new biosciences do to our social, cultural, and legal conceptions of personhood? How does our legal apparatus incorporate new legitimations from the emerging biosciences into its knowledge system? And what kind of ethical, socio-political, and scientific consequences are attached to the establishment of such new legalities? The book examines these problems by looking at materialities, the posthuman, and the relational in the (un)making of legalities. Themes and topics include postgenomic research, gene editing, neuroscience, epigenetics, precision medicine, regenerative medicine, reproductive technologies, border technologies, and theoretical debates in legal theory on the relationship between persons, property, and rights.

This encyclopedia comprehensively covers all aspects of what has become the dynamic domain of behavioral medicine. It collects together the knowledge generated by this interdisciplinary field, highlighting the links between science and practice.

This ground-breaking book sets out a fresh vision for a future medical education by providing a radical reconceptualisation of the purposes of medical humanities through a lens of critical health psychology and liberatory pedagogy. The medical humanities are conceived as translational media through which reductive, instrumental biomedicine can be raised in quality, intensity, and complexity by embracing ethical, aesthetic, political, and transcendental values. This translation occurs through innovative use of metaphor. A note of caution is offered – that the medical humanities too can be instrumental and reductive if not framed well. Drawing on major theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière and bringing together insights from diverse but inter-related fields, Bleakley focuses on the "ills" of contemporary biomedicine and medical education, and the need for reconceptualisation, which – it is argued – the translational medical humanities have the potential to accomplish. Current instrumental approaches to medical humanities, embracing communication skills training and narrative-based medicine, have failed to address the chronic symptoms suffered by medicine. These include resort to closed, functional systems thinking rather than embracing dynamic, complex, open, and adaptive systems thinking; lack of democratic habits in medical culture, compromising patient safety and care; the production of insensibility rather than deepening of sensibility in medical education; a lack of attention to ethics, aesthetics, and politics where the instrumental is privileged; and a lack of critical reflexivity in revisioning habitual practices. Through persuasive argument, Bleakley sets out a more radical manifesto for the role the arts and humanities might play in medical/healthcare education and offers a new approach based on curriculum process rather than syllabus content, to recuperate aesthetic sensibilities, discernment, and affect in medicine. The book will appeal to medical and healthcare educators, medical and health humanities scholars, engaged clinicians, social scientists drawing on critical theory, and arts and humanities practitioners engaging with medical and healthcare themes.

First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.