Understanding Illness & Health

UNDERSTANDING HEALTH & ILLNESS

A HEALTH STUDIES READER

Understanding Illness in Everyday Life Andy Skelton, Ph.D. Psychology This essay helps us identify the unstated assumptions we make in the process of explaining symptoms and ill feelings and how these assumptions guide us (and sometimes mislead us) in understanding and coping with illness.

Suffering in Serious Illness: Understanding the Role of Personal Identity Greg Lewis, M.D., Gastroenterology This essay examines how serious illness (such as AIDS, cancer, ALS, and multiple sclerosis) may affect one’s personal identity and how this change in identity - with the progression of the disease - contributes to suffering.

Illness As Transformative Gift in People with Fibromyalgia Shelly Scammell, Ph.D. Psychology This chapter examines how handling a chronic health problem may result in positive change. Interviews with individuals with Fibromyalgia focuses on using chronic illness as a transformation to a more authentic self.

Doctor As Patient: The Case of Multiple Sclerosis Fred Kauffman, M.D., Emergency Medicine Multiple Sclerosis (MS) -- a disease of the central nervous system -- is a major cause of physical disability affecting approximately 500,000 people in the United States. This essay charts the emotional journey of an inner-city emergency physician who, once afflicted with MS, must learn, now as a patient, to develop an emotionally healthy approach to living with a chronic disease.
	Dawn Staley and the Dawn Staley Foundation National MS (Multiple Sclerosis) Society	Band Against MS: Clay Walker Multiple Sclerosis Foundation

Telling Stories of Suffering Dan Schubert, Ph.D. Sociology Awaiting original draft.