Description
Book SynopsisDiversity plays an important role in how people experience illness and healthcare as patients. Listening carefully to stories of how race, class, age, gender, sexuality, and disability can affect patient experience can be revealing and provide much needed change to health communication in the patienthood narrative. This book is a collection of vibrant and engaging essays by scholars of narrative methods in health communication. Each chapter takes readers into the fascinating world of patients who use stories from their personal lives to challenge us to rethink, reimagine, and reformulate what health communication means in practice. Each section of the book focuses on an important aspect of the theory and practice of the patienthood narrative. Part one explores the important ways that telling and sharing patient's stories can lead to learning, empowerment, and advocacy. Part two explores several key forms of diversity and how they affect patienthood. Part three illustrates how personal,
Trade ReviewThis groundbreaking book is an important step to balancing understanding of key health communication issues by vividly presenting the sincere voices and experiences of health care consumers through first-hand personal narrative accounts of their significant health experiences. This is a critically important book that provides direction and evidence for employing the perspectives of health care consumers to fully understand major communication needs and issues in the delivery of care and promotion of health. It also provides wonderful examples of how to use narrative ethnographic health communication research effectively as a rich and revealing method for understanding consumers' experiences of health and health care. -- Gary L. Kreps, George Mason University
Narrating Patienthood invites us to listen with our hearts to understand the harsh realities of borders created through prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, and cultural misunderstandings in ways that limit access, marginalize, and silence the voices of people desperately in need of care. Each chapter in this book demands our attention, offering engaging and thought-provoking insights of the ways we communicate through these borders to form communities of care with other patients, providers, and family members and together construct compelling truths of advocacy, empowerment, and change in our health care systems. -- Patricia Geist-Martin, San Diego State University
Table of ContentsChapter 1: Narrating Patient Experience: Benefits for multiple audiences Chapter 2: From Stories to Discoveries: Patients’ Narratives as Advocacy in Biomedical Research Chapter 3: Cultural Communication Competency as a Two-Way Street: My Journey from Medical Avoidance to Patient Self-Advocacy Chapter 4: Who will tell our stories? Emerging health legacies following the 2014-2016 Ebola Epidemic Chapter 5: African Americans and Hospice Care: On Social Risk, Privacy Management, and Relational Health Advocacy Chapter 6: Can You Please Direct me to a Doctor That Has a Heart?: A Stage 4 Breast Cancer Patient Narrative Chapter 7: Exploring the Effects of Patient-Provider Communication on the Lives of Women with Vulvodynia Chapter 8: Queer Patienthood Chapter 9: An Autoethnographic Account of Navigating Patienthood as a Person with Hearing Impairment Chapter 10: From Consumer to Community-Based Researcher: Lessons from the HIV Stigma Index Chapter 11: The Gendered Nature of Generosity in Post-Hysterectomy “Dear Honey…” Letters Chapter 12: The Narrative Journey and Decision-Making Process of Plastic Surgery Patienthood Chapter 13: Narrative Sense-Making in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Chapter 14: Healthy mother, healthy baby: An Autoethnography to Challenge the Dominant Cultural Narrative of the Birthing Patient Chapter 15: Abelist Biases
