The 'chessboard of healing strategies' : A cardiological application

© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd..

RATIONALE: The question of how to adaptively cope with chronic illnesses, aging, and other sources of bodily impairment is crucial for patients and clinicians alike, though sometimes overlooked in the focus on biomedical treatment.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: To examine the array of strategies available to patients and their practitioners, to employ in the face of bodily breakdown.

METHOD: Co-written by a philosopher and cardiologist, this article uses a detailed case study of a patient suffering a myocardial infarction leading to chronic heart failure, with examples of effective or suboptimal care. This enables a discussion of how the clinician or clinical team can best facilitate existential healing, that is, adaptive and creative resilience in the face of chronic impairment.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: We outline a "chessboard of healing," involving the possibility-spaces for dealing constructively with bodily breakdown. This set of strategies is shown to be nonarbitrary, drawn directly from contemporary work on the phenomenology of the lived body. For example, as we both experience the body as that which 'I am', and as that which 'I have', separable from the self, patients can react to illness by moving towards their bodies in modes of listening and befriending, or away from their body, ignoring or detaching themselves from symptoms. Then too, as the body is ever changing in time, one can seek restoration to a previous state, or transformation to new patterns of bodily usage, including passage into a whole new life-narrative.

Medienart:

E-Artikel

Erscheinungsjahr:

2023

Erschienen:

2023

Enthalten in:

Zur Gesamtaufnahme - volume:29

Enthalten in:

Journal of evaluation in clinical practice - 29(2023), 7 vom: 21. Okt., Seite 1180-1188

Sprache:

Englisch

Beteiligte Personen:

Leder, Drew [VerfasserIn]
Krucoff, Mitchell W [VerfasserIn]

Links:

Volltext

Themen:

Adaptation, psychological
Cardiac rehabilitation
Chronic illness
Coping strategies
Journal Article
Physical and rehabilitative medicine
Resilience, psychological

Anmerkungen:

Date Completed 25.09.2023

Date Revised 25.09.2023

published: Print-Electronic

Citation Status MEDLINE

doi:

10.1111/jep.13868

funding:

Förderinstitution / Projekttitel:

PPN (Katalog-ID):

NLM357141520