Price: £18.99
Published: 2007
Synopisis
This book is about the nature of meaning, the relationship of meaning to the body, and the way in which meaning expresses itself in our health or lack of it. In another way it is about the conjunction of mind, body, and spirit. In a more practical perspective, the message is that meaning-full disease does make sense, that we do have a sound basis for a holism that includes meaning, and that we had better sort out our models of healthcare if we want to be the sorts of clinicians and healers our patients and clients deserve.
Description
The book is grounded upon Brian Broom'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", Broom 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. Broom 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. His unapologetic grappling with the intellectual challenges comes with depth, breadth, and clarity, and appeals to a wide audience, including clinicians of all kinds - from doctors to psychotherapists - scientists, and serious lay-readers.
‘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, UNC Center for Functional GI and Motility Disorders, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
‘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, PhD
Academic Director School of Medical Sciences, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Contents
1 The phenomena
2 Colliding mind-sets
3 Somatic metaphors
4 Language-making and disease
5 Meaning-full disease explorers
6 Disease as communication
7 Who ‘sees' meaning-full disease?
8 Meaning-full disease and the lebenswelt
9 Meaning-full disease and the ‘visible'
10 Shifting awareness and different kinds of body
11 The scheming body
12 Experience as a ‘fundamental'
13 Meaning-full disease and spirit
BIBLIOGRAPHY
About the Author
Professor Brian Broom MBChB FRACP MSc(Imm) MNZAP is adjunct professor at the Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand, and leads the post-graduate programme in MindBody Healthcare. His other book is "Somatic Illness and the Patient's Other Story. A Practical Integrative Mind/Body Approach to Disease for Doctors and Psychotherapists". He works as consultant physician (allergy and clinical immunology), psychotherapist, and mindbody specialist, at the Arahura Health Centre, Christchurch, New Zealand.
