The Psychological Impact of Acute and Chronic Illness: A Practical Guide for Primary Care Physicians / Edition 1

by Tamara Greenberg

Overview

n the following pages, Dr. Greenberg delineates the complex forces at Iplay within patients who are newly ill or disabled, within physicians who do their best to guide patients through those debilities, and in the inter- tion that patient–physician dyads perform thousands of times daily to try to make sense of the patient’s plight. As a physician and medical educator who thinks about how to enhance communication between patients and physicians, I often view commu- cation challenges as arising from divergent cultural experiences. Each patient has a unique method of experiencing, deriving meaning from, and coping with a new or chronic illness. This approach is necessarily filtered through the patient’s family and social contexts and the patient’s current living situation. Physicians, too, bring psychosocial upbringing and current social c- text into their clinical practice settings. We have also been inculcated into a medical culture that takes its bright, impressionable, idealistic young and shapes them, sometimes brutally, into diagnosticians and proceduralists. We are just now beginning to understand the many components of the “hidden curriculum” of many medical schools – unspoken but powerful influences in training that undercut the humanity of trainees and turn them into poorer communicators than when they first started.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780387336824
Publisher:	Springer New York
Publication date:	12/07/2006
Edition description:	2007
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

Dr. Greenberg, a psychologist, is affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco. Her experience has involved consulting with physicians regarding the psychological well being of medical patients.

Table of Contents

Medical Illness: Why Consider Emotional Factors?.- Doctors and Patients: The Context of Modern Medicine.- Becoming a Patient: Adapting to Illness.- Special Issues in Coping with Chronic Illness.- Pharmacological Interventions.- The Impact of Illness on Family Members.- Trust in Patient-Physician Relationships.- Difficult Medical Patients.- Referring to a Mental Health Professional.