The Art of Conversation Through Serious Illness

The Art of Conversation Through Serious Illness PDF Author: Richard McQuellon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199752869
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Every day, thousands of people receive a diagnosis of serious, life-threatening illness, and their families and friends suddenly become caregivers. Despite the best of intentions it is not always easy to communicate well under these circumstances, or find deep empathy for something one has never before experienced. When is it best to speak, and when to be silent? How can someone provide real comfort, and how can relationships with loved ones facing serious illness be enhanced in this most difficult time? This book is about how to be an encouraging caregiver and friend under the most difficult circumstances, when the possibility of death is all too real The authors believe that open dialogue must not be avoided until the last minute when opportunities will be limited, but that caregivers and loved ones can embrace this time, mortal time, honestly as a way to sensitively and compassionately engage with those for whom a central fact of life is realized--that all of our lives are time-limited. In The Art of Conversation Through Serious Illness, the authors consider how to best listen to and speak with one facing life-threatening illness, with lessons on being a primary conversation partner, becoming properly empathic and receiving empathy, maintaining everyday conversation, using platitudes appropriately, understanding healthy denial, and talking about dying. Offering bedside guidance usually only available to professionals and peppered with insightful anecdotes from the authors' own experiences, this gentle, succinct book is appropriate for anyone going through this uniquely difficult yet universal life experience.

The Art of Conversation Through Serious Illness

The Art of Conversation Through Serious Illness PDF Author: Richard McQuellon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199752869
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
Every day, thousands of people receive a diagnosis of serious, life-threatening illness, and their families and friends suddenly become caregivers. Despite the best of intentions it is not always easy to communicate well under these circumstances, or find deep empathy for something one has never before experienced. When is it best to speak, and when to be silent? How can someone provide real comfort, and how can relationships with loved ones facing serious illness be enhanced in this most difficult time? This book is about how to be an encouraging caregiver and friend under the most difficult circumstances, when the possibility of death is all too real The authors believe that open dialogue must not be avoided until the last minute when opportunities will be limited, but that caregivers and loved ones can embrace this time, mortal time, honestly as a way to sensitively and compassionately engage with those for whom a central fact of life is realized--that all of our lives are time-limited. In The Art of Conversation Through Serious Illness, the authors consider how to best listen to and speak with one facing life-threatening illness, with lessons on being a primary conversation partner, becoming properly empathic and receiving empathy, maintaining everyday conversation, using platitudes appropriately, understanding healthy denial, and talking about dying. Offering bedside guidance usually only available to professionals and peppered with insightful anecdotes from the authors' own experiences, this gentle, succinct book is appropriate for anyone going through this uniquely difficult yet universal life experience.

Visualizing Disease

Visualizing Disease PDF Author: Domenico Bertoloni Meli
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022646363X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Visual anatomy books have been a staple of medical practice and study since the mid-sixteenth century. But the visual representation of diseased states followed a very different pattern from anatomy, one we are only now beginning to investigate and understand. With Visualizing Disease, Domenico Bertoloni Meli explores key questions in this domain, opening a new field of inquiry based on the analysis of a rich body of arresting and intellectually challenging images reproduced here both in black and white and in color. Starting in the Renaissance, Bertoloni Meli delves into the wide range of figures involved in the early study and representation of disease, including not just men of medicine, like anatomists, physicians, surgeons, and pathologists, but also draftsmen and engravers. Pathological preparations proved difficult to preserve and represent, and as Bertoloni Meli takes us through a number of different cases from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, we gain a new understanding of how knowledge of disease, interactions among medical men and artists, and changes in the technologies of preservation and representation of specimens interacted to slowly bring illustration into the medical world.

Illness as Many Narratives

Illness as Many Narratives PDF Author: Stella Bolaki
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474402437
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Illness narratives have become a cultural phenomenon in the Western world. In what ways can they be seen to have aesthetic, ethical and political value? What do they reveal about experiences of illness, the relationship between the body and identity and the role of the arts in bearing witness to illness for people who are ill and those connected to them? How can they influence medicine, the arts and shape public understandings of health and illness? These questions and more are explored in Illness as Many Narratives, which contains readings of a rich array of representations of illness from the 1980s to the present. A wide range of arts and media are considered such as life writing, photography, performance, film, theatre, artists' books and animation. The individual chapters deploy multidisciplinary critical frameworks and discuss physical and mental illness. Through reading this book you will gain an understanding of the complex contribution illness narratives make to contemporary culture and the emergent field of Critical Medical Humanities.

Madness, Art, and Society

Madness, Art, and Society PDF Author: Anna Harpin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351371045
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
How is madness experienced, treated, and represented? How might art think around – and beyond – psychiatric definitions of illness and wellbeing? Madness, Art, and Society engages with artistic practices from theatre and live art to graphic fiction, charting a multiplicity of ways of thinking critically with, rather than about, non-normative psychological experience. It is organised into two parts: ‘Structures: psychiatrists, institutions, treatments’, illuminates the environments, figures and primary models of psychiatric care, reconsidering their history and contemporary manifestations through case studies including David Edgar’s Mary Barnes and Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. ‘Experiences: realities, bodies, moods’, promblematises diagnostic categories and proposes more radically open models of thinking in relation to experiences of madness, touching upon works such as Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko and Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places, and Things. Reading its case studies as a counter-discourse to orthodox psychiatry, Madness, Art, and Society seeks a more nuanced understanding of the plurality of madness in society, and in so doing, offers an outstanding resource for students and scholars alike.

When Walls Become Doorways

When Walls Become Doorways PDF Author: Tobi Zausner
Publisher: Harmony
ISBN: 9780307238085
Category : Adaptability (Psychology)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Using the lives of artists as inspiration, "When Walls Become Doorways" explores the transformative power of illness and the ability of productivity and creativity to heal the soul.

Medicine in Art

Medicine in Art PDF Author: Giorgio Bordin
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606060449
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Fully illustrated with hundreds of artworks, this guide explores depictions of illness and healing in Western art.

Why We Get Sick

Why We Get Sick PDF Author: Benjamin Bikman
Publisher: BenBella Books
ISBN: 1950665178
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
A scientist reveals the groundbreaking evidence linking many major diseases, including cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease, to a common root cause—insulin resistance—and shares an easy, effective plan to reverse and prevent it. We are sick. Around the world, we struggle with diseases that were once considered rare. Cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, and diabetes affect millions each year; many people are also struggling with hypertension, weight gain, fatty liver, dementia, low testosterone, menstrual irregularities and infertility, and more. We treat the symptoms, not realizing that all of these diseases and disorders have something in common. Each of them is caused or made worse by a condition known as insulin resistance. And you might have it. Odds are you do—over half of all adults in the United States are insulin resistant, with most other countries either worse or not far behind. In Why We Get Sick, internationally renowned scientist and pathophysiology professor Benjamin Bikman explores why insulin resistance has become so prevalent and why it matters. Unless we recognize it and take steps to reverse the trend, major chronic diseases will be even more widespread. But reversing insulin resistance is possible, and Bikman offers an evidence-based plan to stop and prevent it, with helpful food lists, meal suggestions, easy exercise principles, and more. Full of surprising research and practical advice, Why We Get Sick will help you to take control of your health.

Perilous Chastity

Perilous Chastity PDF Author: Laurinda S. Dixon
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501735764
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Bearing such titles as The Doctor's Visit or The Lovesick Maiden, certain seventeenth-century Dutch paintings are familiar to museum browsers: an attractive young woman—well dressed, but pale and listless—reclines in a chair, languishes in bed, or falls to the floor in a faint. Weathered crones or impish boys leer suggestively in the background. These paintings traditionally have been viewed as commentary on quack doctors or unmarried pregnant women. The first book to examine images of women and illness in the light of medical history, Perilous Chastity reveals a surprising new interpretation. In an engaging analysis enhanced by abundant illustrations-including eight pages of color plates—Laurinda S. Dixon shows how paintings reflect changing medical theories concerning women. While she illuminates a tradition stretching from antiquity to the present, she concentrates on art from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and particularly on paintings from seventeenth-century Leiden. Dixon suggests how the assumptions of a predominantly male medical establishment have influenced prevailing notions of women's social place. She traces the evolution of the belief that women's illnesses were caused by "hysteria," so named in ancient Greece after the notion that the uterus had a tendency to wander in the body. All women were considered prone to hysteria-strong emotions, idleness, intellectual activity, or unladylike pursuits could cause it—but it was most commonly diagnosed among celibates. Analyzing paintings of women's sickrooms by Jan Steen, Dirck Hals, Gabriel Metsu, Jacob Ochtervelt, Godfried Schalcken, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and Franz van Mieris, Dixon perceives metaphoric identifications of the womb as the source of illness. She also documents changing fashions in cures for hysteria and discusses allusions to the debilitating effects of women's passions not only in paintings, but also in madrigals by John Dowland and Henry Purcell. In conclusion, Dixon argues that her study has strong ramifications of attitudes towards women and illness today. She takes up images in twentieth-century culture as well and calls attention to a resurgence of female "hysteria" after World War II.

The Art of Dying Well

The Art of Dying Well PDF Author: Katy Butler
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1501135473
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This “comforting…thoughtful” (The Washington Post) guide to maintaining a high quality of life—from resilient old age to the first inklings of a serious illness to the final breath—by the New York Times bestselling author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a “roadmap to the end that combines medical, practical, and spiritual guidance” (The Boston Globe). “A common sense path to define what a ‘good’ death looks like” (USA TODAY), The Art of Dying Well is about living as well as possible for as long as possible and adapting successfully to change. Packed with extraordinarily helpful insights and inspiring true stories, award-winning journalist Katy Butler shows how to thrive in later life (even when coping with a chronic medical condition), how to get the best from our health system, and how to make your own “good death” more likely. Butler explains how to successfully age in place, why to pick a younger doctor and how to have an honest conversation with them, when not to call 911, and how to make your death a sacred rite of passage rather than a medical event. This handbook of preparations—practical, communal, physical, and spiritual—will help you make the most of your remaining time, be it decades, years, or months. Based on Butler’s experience caring for aging parents, and hundreds of interviews with people who have successfully navigated our fragmented health system and helped their loved ones have good deaths, The Art of Dying Well also draws on the expertise of national leaders in family medicine, palliative care, geriatrics, oncology, and hospice. This “empowering guide clearly outlines the steps necessary to prepare for a beautiful death without fear” (Shelf Awareness).

The Renewal of Generosity

The Renewal of Generosity PDF Author: Arthur W. Frank
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226260259
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Contemporary health care often lacks generosity of spirit, even when treatment is most efficient. Too many patients are left unhappy with how they are treated, and too many medical professionals feel estranged from the calling that drew them to medicine. Arthur W. Frank tells the stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who are restoring generosity to medicine—generosity toward others and to themselves. The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process. The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing.