Summary
Contents
Subject index
In this book Richard Gwyn demonstrates the centrality of discourse analysis to an understanding of health and communication. Focusing on language and communication issues he demonstrates that it is possible to observe and analyze patterns in the ways in which health and illness are represented and articulated by both health professionals and lay people. Communicating Health and Illness: · Explores culturally validated notions of health and sickness and the medicalization of illness · Surveys media representations of health and illness · Considers the metaphoric nature of talk about illness · Contributes to the ongoing debate in relation to narrative based medicine
Power, Asymmetry and Decision Making in Medical Encounters
Power, Asymmetry and Decision Making in Medical Encounters
In studies of interviews with patients, stories are told and folk wisdom is passed on that owe their existence to the many and often contradictory voices to which people are exposed in the realms of illness and health care. In Chapter 2 we saw, from the account given by the Ryans as well as in the studies by Blaxter and Williams, that even when accounting for illness experience in everyday life people refer overwhelmingly to doctor-patient relations. The medicalization of experience, perpetrated by popular magazines, television documentaries and an array of media ‘experts’, also contributes to the manufacture of ‘commonsense’ knowledge about health issues. But by far the most influential ...
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