Overview

The book is grounded upon the author's extensive professional involvement with physical diseases that are a powerful expression of the patients' emotional themes and life-stories. They are meaning-full diseases. They occur commonly, and are the most compelling argument for an urgent acknowledgment of the role of meanings in the healing process. Following the pattern of his first book, Somatic Illness and the Patient's Other Story, the author shows in case after case that listening and responding to the ""story"" of patients suffering from persistent physical diseases frequently leads to major reversal of the disease processes. This present book takes a crucial second step. There must be an understandable basis for meaning-full diseases. Resistance to them relates in part to the inability of current Western scientific and biomedical theories to explain them. The author sets out to construct conceptual frameworks, within which clinicians and patients can see that a close relationship between life experience and the appearance of physical disease really does make sense.

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9780367105723

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Reviews

Using stories from patients' lives and embellishing them through personal insights and the writings of clinicians, authors and philosophers, Dr Broom breaks through the constraints of traditional biomedicine and opens the door to truly understanding the personal meaning of illness and disease. This book is a valuable addition for those who are open to acquiring insights into mind-body interactions. --Douglas A. Drossman, MD, Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry, Co-Director, Professor Broom has long been at the forefront of mind-body health issues in New Zealand and was instrumental in establishing The MindBody Trust. He has given us what is quite simply a superb book, arising as it does from his commitment to a most honest, rigorous and integrated understanding of the personhood of his patients and the frameworks through which their disease processes and histories are interpreted. He explores issues that are problematic in our current viewpoints about human health and offers a much more coherent understanding of illness and its resolution that encompasses all aspects of what it is to be human. This very approachable book deserves to be very widely read and should be essential reading for all medical and other health practitioners, and biomedical scientists. --Associate Professor, Roger Booth, Academic Director, School of Medical Sciences

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Brian Broom

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