Health And The Rhetoric Of Medicine

Assessing rhetorical principles of contemporary health issues Hypochondriacs are vulnerable to media hype, anorexics are susceptible to public scrutiny, and migraine sufferers are tainted with the history of the “migraine personality,” maintains rhetorical theorist Judy Z. Segal. All are influenced by the power of persuasion. Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine explores persistent health conditions that resist conventional medical solutions. Using a range of rhetorical principles, Segal analyzes how patients and their illnesses are formed within the physician/patient relationship. The intractable problem of a patient’s rejection of a doctor’s advice, says Segal, can be considered a rhetorical failure—a failure of persuasion. Examining the discourse of medicine through case studies, applications, and analyses, Segal illustrates how illnesses are described in ways that limit patients’ choices and satisfaction. She also illuminates psychiatric conditions, infectious diseases, genetic testing, and cosmetic surgeries through the lens of rhetorical theory. Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine bridges critical analysis for scholarly, professional, and lay audiences. Segal highlights the persuasive element in diagnosis, health policy, illness experience, and illness narratives. She also addresses questions of direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, the role of health information in creating the “worried well” and problems of trust and expertise in physician/patient relationships. A useful resource for critical common sense in everyday life, the text provides an effective examination of a society increasingly influenced by the rhetoric of health and medicine.

Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health & Medicine charts new methodological territories for rhetorical studies and the emerging field of the rhetoric of health and medicine. It advances the larger goal of differentiating the rhetoric of health and medicine as a distinct but pragmatically diverse area of study.

The Rhetoric of Medicine explores problems that confront medical professionals today by first examining similar problems that confronted physicians in ancient Greece. This framework provides illuminating entry points into challenges faced by the practice of medicine, enabling readers to understand more clearly their shape and operation in the modern context-as well as their possible solutions. Topics covered include: larger cultural ideas about the body; tension between professional values and working for money; effective collaboration and competition with alternative healthcare providers; restrictions on political involvement that are part of a physician's identity; maintaining a space for professional autonomy and judgment; mentoring that is effective but not exclusive; and physicians' recognition of themselves as patients as well as professionals. A unique collaboration between a classicist and a neurosurgeon, The Rhetoric of Medicine is a call to interrogate the narratives and ideas that shape medical care and to revise and replace those that do not serve patient health.

This book explores rhetorical ethos and its ongoing role in patients’ credibility and in misdiagnoses stemming from gender, race and class-based biases. Drawing on the concept of ethos as a theoretical framework, it explores health and mental illness across different conditions and across different methodological approaches. Extending work on ethos in clinical encounters and public discourse about biomedicine and presenting new research on the rhetoric of mental health, stigma and mental illness, the book explores how bias in clinical settings can lead to symptoms labelled "in the patient’s head" masking treatable medical problems. This notable contribution to the rhetoric of health and medicine will be of interest to all researchers and graduate students of rhetoric and composition studies, rhetoric of health and medicine, disability studies, medical humanities, communication, and psychology.

Examines how healthcare and medical issues circulate in the social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of our world.

Challenging the dominant account of medical law as normatively and conceptually subordinate to medical or bioethics, this book provides an innovative account of medical law as a rhetorical practice. The aspiration to provide a firm grounding for medical law in ethical principle has not yet been realized. Rather, legal doctrine is marked, if anything, by increasingly evident contradiction and indeterminacy that are symptomatic of the inherently contingent nature of legal argumentation. Against the idea of a timeless, placeless ethics as the master discipline for medical law, this book demonstrates how judicial and academic reasoning seek to manage this contingency, through the deployment of rhetorical strategies, persuasive to concrete audiences within specific historical, cultural and political contexts. Informed by social and legal theory, cultural history and literary criticism, John Harrington’s careful reading of key judicial decisions, legislative proposals and academic interventions offers an original, and significant, understanding of medical law.

Rhetorical Questions of Health and Medicine illustrates how rhetorical theory and analysis contribute to our understanding of the ways in which pressing questions are posed, debated, and answered in the context of contemporary medicine.

This volume charts new methodological territories for rhetorical studies and the emerging field of the rhetoric of health and medicine. In offering an expanded, behind-the-scenes view of rhetorical methodologies, it advances the larger goal of differentiating the rhetoric of health and medicine as a distinct but pragmatically diverse area of study, while providing rhetoricians and allied scholars new ways to approach and explain their research. Collectively, the volume’s 16 chapters: Develop, through extended examples of research, creative theories and methodologies for studying and engaging medicine’s high-stakes practices. Provide thick descriptions of and heuristics for methodological invention and adaptation that meet the needs of needs of new and established researchers. Discuss approaches to researching health and medical rhetorics across a range of contexts (e.g., historical, transnational, socio-cultural, institutional) and about a range of ethical issues (e.g., agency, social justice, responsiveness).

Health promotion has been a relatively overlooked area in modern medical and health professional vocational curricula. This practical and informative book aims to redress the balance towards health promotion being a visible, integrated curricular component, with agreed principles on quality in health promotion teaching across various faculties. Experienced and enthusiastic writers with expertise in health promotion, public health and medical education explore how curricular structures can accommodate the discipline, providing examples of teaching sessions and methods of teaching health promotion within integrated curricula. 'Do not fear another dry discussion of how to stop patients smoking! This book takes a stimulatingly lateral view of the scope of the subject, goes a very long way to showing why it is essential to medical education, and gives good advice on how to support and develop both the subject and its tutors in today's medical schools.' From the Foreword by Amanda Howe.

NCTE-CCCC Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication 2020 Rhetorical Work in Emergency Medical Services: Communicating in the Unpredictable Workplace details how communicators harness the power of rhetoric to make decisions and communicate in unpredictable contexts. Grounded in a 16-month study in the emergency medical services (EMS) workplace, this text contributes to our theoretical, methodological, and practical understandings of the situation-specific processes that communicators and researchers engage in to respond to the urgencies and constraints of high-stakes workplaces. This book presents these intricate processes and skills—learned and innate—that workplace communicators use to accomplish goal-directed activity, collaborate with other communicators, and complete and teach workplace writing.