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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]
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 She finds that, a decade later, cancer is no longer swathed in secrecy and shame, but has been replaced by AIDS as the disease most demonized by society.
Illness as Metaphor served as a way for Susan Sontag to express her opinions on the use of metaphors in order to refer to illnesses, with her main focuses being tuberculosis and cancer. The book contrasts the viewpoints and metaphors associated with each disease.
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 ...
Military metaphors are particularly common in descriptions of cancer's human effects, and they emphasize both the state of the patient's health and the need to take immediate, decisive actions himself rather than to delay, to ignore or to rely entirely on others.
The American Cancer Society issued a statement [6] entitled Unproven Methods of Cancer Management that summarized Simonton's methods by: "After careful study of the literature and other information available to it, the American Cancer Society does not have evidence that treatment with O. Carl Simonton's psychotherapy method results in objective ...
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.