Meaning-Full Disease: How Personal Experience and Meanings Cause and Maintain Physical Illness

Author(s) : Brian Broom

Book Details

Publisher : Routledge
Published : 2007
Cover : Paperback
Pages : 228
Category :
Individual Psychotherapy
Catalogue No : 25029
ISBN 13 : 9781855754638
ISBN 10 : 1855754630

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The book is grounded upon Brian Broom's extensive professional involvement with physical diseases that are a powerful expression of the patients' emotional themes and life-stories. They are meaning-full diseases. They occur commonly, and are the most compelling argument for an urgent acknowledgment of the role of meanings in the healing process.

Following the pattern of his first book, Somatic Illness and the Patient's Other Story, Broom shows in case after case that listening and responding to the "story" of patients suffering from persistent physical diseases frequently leads to major reversal of the disease processes.

This present book takes a crucial second step. There must be an understandable basis for meaning-full diseases. Resistance to them relates in part to the inability of current Western scientific and biomedical theories to explain them. Broom sets out to construct conceptual frameworks, within which clinicians and patients can see that a close relationship between life experience and the appearance of physical disease really does make sense. His unapologetic grappling with the intellectual challenges comes with depth, breadth, and clarity, and appeals to a wide audience, including clinicians of all kinds - from doctors to psychotherapists - scientists, and serious lay-readers.

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About the Author(s)
Customer Reviews (3)

Reviews and Endorsements

'Using stories from patients' lives and embellishing them through personal insights and the writings of clinicians, authors and philosophers, Dr Broom breaks through the constraints of traditional biomedicine and opens the door to truly understanding the personal meaning of illness and disease. This book is a valuable addition for those who are open to acquiring insights into mind-body interactions.'
- Douglas A. Drossman MD, Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry; Co-Director, UNC Center for Functional GI and Motility Disorders, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

'Professor Broom has long been at the forefront of mind-body health issues in New Zealand and was instrumental in establishing The MindBody Trust. He has given us what is quite simply a superb book, arising as it does from his commitment to a most honest, rigorous and integrated understanding of the personhood of his patients and the frameworks through which their disease processes and histories are interpreted. He explores issues that are problematic in our current viewpoints about human health and offers a much more coherent understanding of illness and its resolution that encompasses all aspects of what it is to be human. This very approachable book deserves to be very widely read and should be essential reading for all medical and other health practitioners, and biomedical scientists.'
- Roger Booth, PhD, Associate Professor, Academic Director School of Medical Sciences, University of Auckland, New Zealand

About the Author(s)

Brian Broom, MBChB, FRACP, MSc (Imm), MNZAP, leads the post-graduate programme in MindBody Healthcare in the department of psychotherapy at the Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. He works as a consultant physician (immunology), psychotherapist, and MindBody specialist in the department of immunology at Auckland City Hospital, New Zealand. His previous books are Somatic Illness and the Patient’s Other Story and Meaning-Full Disease: How Personal Experience and Meanings Cause and Maintain Physical Illness.

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