This book explores the psychosocial impact of serious illness - its effect on a person's identity and relationships - and the doctor's role in counseling patients. Even the most seasoned physician often feels inadequate when it comes to discussing the personal impact of disability and serious illness with patients. It takes time, attention, and skill. Most physicians who are good at this learn what to say from observations of physicians they respect and the conversations they share with patients over many years of practice. Like everything else in medicine, there is a continuous learning curve. This book offers a beginning. It includes first-hand experiences and reflections on serious illness by physicians and patients, concrete advice on how to initiate discussions of difficult psychosocial issues, topics for organising discussion, suggested readings, and guides for patient interviews.'Much is written about patient-centered care and the patient experience.What sets this book apart is, first, Lenore Buckley's ability to tell stories about her own medical experience. These teaching tales give young physicians a sense of the task that their profession requires of them, while keeping that task within human proportions. Second and complementing that is her excellent compilation of quotations and stories from the memoirs of patients and physicians, especially physicians as patients. 'I hope this empathic, useful collection of materials for teaching and reflection finds its way into medical school curricula, and I hope it is one of those books that physicians return to during years of practice, especially when they sense that the treatment expert is crowding the witness out of the room. Patients need both doctors. Lenore Buckley shows how doctors are able to expect nothing less of themselves' - Arthur W Frank in the Foreword.

In August, 1985, the 2nd International Conference on Illness Behaviour was held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The first International Conference took place one year previous in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. This book is based on the proceedings of the second conference. The purpose behind this conference was to facilitate the development of a single integrated model to account for illness experience and presentation. A major focus of the conference was to outline methodological issues related to current behaviour research. A multidiscipl~nary approach was emphasized because of the bias that collaborative efforts are likely to be the most successful in achieving greater understanding of illness behaviour. Significant advances in our knowledge are occurring in all areas of the biological and social sciences, albeit more slowly in the latter areas. Marked specialization in each of these areas has lead to greater difficulty in integrating new knowledge with that of other areas and the development of a meaningful cohesive model to which all can relate. Thus there is a major need for forums such as that provided by this conference.

"Nurses play a vital role in improving the safety and quality of patient car -- not only in the hospital or ambulatory treatment facility, but also of community-based care and the care performed by family members. Nurses need know what proven techniques and interventions they can use to enhance patient outcomes. To address this need, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), with additional funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has prepared this comprehensive, 1,400-page, handbook for nurses on patient safety and quality -- Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0043)." - online AHRQ blurb, http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/nurseshdbk/

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.

From one of America's most celebrated psychiatrists, the book that has taught generations of healers why healing the sick is about more than just diagnosing their illness. Modern medicine treats sick patients like broken machines -- figure out what is physically wrong, fix it, and send the patient on their way. But humans are not machines. When we are ill, we experience our illness: we become scared, distressed, tired, weary. Our illnesses are not just biological conditions, but human ones. It was Arthur Kleinman, a Harvard psychiatrist and anthropologist, who saw this truth when most of his fellow doctors did not. Based on decades of clinical experience studying and treating chronic illness, The Illness Narratives makes a case for interpreting the illness experience of patients as a core feature of doctoring. Before Being Mortal, there was The Illness Narratives. It remains today a prescient and passionate case for bridging the gap between patient and practitioner.

This volume deals with universal processes of therapeutic communication, a term which covers whatever exchange goes on between people who have a therapeutic intent, with an emphasis upon the empirical observation of the communicative process. -- Preface.