Reading the Psychosomatic in Medical and Popular Culture PDF Download

Author: Carol-Ann Farkas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315515679
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
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.

Author: Maria Giulia Marini
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319947273
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
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.

Author: Lester D. Friedman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000622819
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 618

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Book Description
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.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004512705
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
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.

Author: Christopher Dowrick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351998269
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
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.

Author: Louise Penner
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981890
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
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.

Author: Marc de Leeuw
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030278484
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
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.

Author: Suzanne O'Sullivan
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099597853
Category : Emotions
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
A neurologist explores the very real world of psychosomatic illness. Most of us accept the way our heart flutters when we set eyes on the one we secretly admire, or the sweat on our brow as we start the presentation we do not want to give. But few of us are fully aware of how dramatic our body's reactions to emotions can sometimes be. Take Pauline, who first became ill when she was fifteen. What seemed at first to be a urinary infection became joint pain, then food intolerances, then life-threatening appendicitis. And then one day, after a routine operation, Pauline lost all the strength in her legs. Shortly after that her convulsions started. But Pauline's tests are normal; her symptoms seem to have no physical cause whatsoever. Pauline may be an extreme case, but she is by no means alone. As many as a third of men and women visiting their GP have symptoms that are medically unexplained. In most, an emotional root is suspected and yet, when it comes to a diagnosis, this is the very last thing we want to hear, and the last thing doctors want to say. In It's All in Your Head consultant neurologist Dr Suzanne O'Sullivan takes us on a journey through the very real world of psychosomatic illness. She takes us from the extreme -- from paralysis, seizures and blindness -- to more everyday problems such as tiredness and pain. Meeting her patients, she encourages us to look deep inside the human condition. There we find the secrets we are all capable of keeping from ourselves, and our age-old failure to credit the intimate and extraordinary connection between mind and body.

Author: Norman B. Anderson
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 0761923608
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 1017

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Book Description
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.

Author: Anne Harrington
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393071081
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
"A splendid history of mind-body medicine...a book that desperately needed to be written." —Jerome Groopman, New York Times Is stress a deadly disease on the rise in modern society? Can mind-body practices from the East help us become well? When it comes to healing, we believe we must look beyond doctors and drugs; we must look within ourselves. Faith, relationships, and attitude matter. But why do we believe such things? From psychoanalysis to the placebo effect to meditation, this vibrant cultural history describes mind-body healing as rooted in a patchwork of stories, allowing us to make new sense of our suffering and to rationalize new treatments and lifestyles.