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A Condition of Doubt - The Meanings of Hypochondria (Hardcover)
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A Condition of Doubt - The Meanings of Hypochondria (Hardcover)
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The "hypochondriac" is a complicated figure, often treated with
scorn and derision, resented for making excessive demands on
attention and health care resources. Lacking credibility but
needing to be taken seriously, the hypochondriac is most doctors'
least favorite patient. Yet people who suffer from hypochondria
endure the anxiety of suspecting they are seriously ill, or are
about to be, and having their suspicions and their suffering
dismissed as baseless.
A Condition of Doubt seeks to change the way we think about
hypochondria, and to use hypochondria to sharpen our thinking about
health care. It claims that contemporary hypochondria should be
understood less as mental illness in particular patients than as a
rational if maladaptive condition emerging from gaps between
doctors' and patients' expectations of contemporary Western
medicine.
Medicine relies on objective evidence to verify the absence or
presence of disease. The hypochondriac struggles to accept
reassurance that no disease can be found. Examining the tension
between these two positions reveals insights into clinical
reasoning and practice, into patients' (not just hypochondriacs')
clinical experiences, and into our medicalizing culture's troubled
understandings of health, illness, risk, and uncertainty.
The book's four parts examine hypochondria as a condition of
biology; of medicine; of culture; and of narrative. Using a wealth
of texts from the medical literature, published illness narratives,
psychiatric diagnostics, online discussions, and popular culture, A
Condition of Doubt is both an example of, and a case for, the place
of serious humanities scholarship in understanding medicine and in
understanding how medicine thinks about itself and trains its
practitioners.
This book argues that over the last half-century, patients have
become postmodern but medicine has not, and claims that
hypochondria-as a shared cultural condition-can be addressed by
rethinking both patients' expectations of medical omniscience and
physicians' need to meet such expectations. This means
reconceptualizing hypochondria and, more broadly, reconceptualizing
medicine's orientation toward the unknown
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