Patients Making Meaning

<p>This book explores how women make meaning at various health flashpoints in their lives overcoming fear anxiety and anger to draw upon self-advocacy research and crucial decision-making.</p><p>Combining focus group research content analysis autoethnography and textual inquiry the book argues that the making and remaking of what we call “patient epistemologies” is a continual process wherein a health flashpoint—sometimes a new diagnosis sometimes a reoccurrence or worsening of an existing condition or the progression of a natural process—can cause an individual to be thrust into a discourse community that was not of their own choosing.</p><p>This study will interest students and scholars of health communication rhetoric of health and medicine women’s studies public health healthcare policy philosophy of medicine medical sociology and medical humanities.</p>