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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Updated second edition: “A bold and imaginative book which moves our thinking about narratives of illness in new directions.” —Sociology of Heath and Illness Since it was first published in 1995, The Wounded Storyteller has occupied a unique place in the body of work on illness. A collective portrait of a so-called “remission society” of those who suffer from illness or disability, as well as a cogent analysis of their stories within a larger framework of narrative theory, Arthur W. Frank’s book has reached a large and diverse readership including the ill, medical professionals, and scholars of literary theory. Drawing on the work of such authors as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known—Gilda Radner’s battle with ovarian cancer—to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilities. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: They abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. In this new edition Frank adds a preface describing the personal and cultural times when the first edition was written. His new afterword extends the book’s argument significantly, discussing storytelling and experience, other modes of illness narration, and a version of hope that is both realistic and aspirational. Reflecting on his own life during the creation of the first edition and the conclusions of the book itself, he reminds us of the power of storytelling as way to understand our own suffering. “Arthur W. Frank’s second edition of The Wounded Storyteller provides instructions for use of this now-classic text in the study of illness narratives.” —Rita Charon, author of Narrative Medicine “Frank sees the value of illness narratives not so much in solving clinical conundrums as in addressing the question of how to live a good life.” —Christianity Today