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Patients perceive treatment to be more difficult when it is described to them using violent metaphors. [6] These metaphors can also lead to feelings of disempowerment, guilt, and fatalism. [6] One study found that the use of war metaphors in cancer public health decreased engagement in cancer prevention behaviors. [13]
Her final argument was that metaphors are not useful for patients, since metaphors make patients feel as if their illness was due to their feelings, rather than lack of effective treatment. [2] The most effective way of thinking about illness would be to avoid metaphorical thinking, and to focus on only the physical components and treatment.
Illness as Metaphor was a response to Sontag's experiences as a cancer patient, as she noticed that the cultural myths surrounding cancer negatively affected her as a patient. She finds that, a decade later, cancer is no longer swathed in secrecy and shame, but has been replaced by AIDS as the disease most demonized by society.
Many people take issue with the words “fight” and “battle” in relation to cancer, saying that it subjects patients to unfair pressure to overcome the disease.
Narrative medicine is the discipline of applying the skills used in analyzing literature to interviewing patients. [1] The premise of narrative medicine is that how a patient speaks about his or her illness or complaint is analogous to how literature offers a plot (an interconnected series of events) with characters (the patient and others) and is filled with metaphors (picturesque, emotional ...
The use of metaphors is a stimulating element of supportive psychotherapy that “[utilizes] different parts of the patient’s brain than those stimulated by many of the other more language based techniques.” A metaphor is said to “stick” in a patient's head in a “very durable way.”
Some cancer patients treat the loss of their hair from chemotherapy as a metonymy or metaphor for all the losses caused by the disease. [49] Some diseases are used as metaphors for social ills: "Cancer" is a common description for anything that is endemic and destructive in society, such as poverty, injustice, or racism.
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