Diversity plays an important role in how people experience illness and healthcare as patients. Listening carefully to stories of how race, class, age, gender, sexuality, and disability can affect patient experience can be revealing and provide much needed change to health communication in the patienthood narrative. This book is a collection of vibrant and engaging essays by scholars of narrative methods in health communication. Each chapter takes readers into the fascinating world of patients who use stories from their personal lives to challenge us to rethink, reimagine, and reformulate what health communication means in practice. Each section of the book focuses on an important aspect of the theory and practice of the patienthood narrative. Part one explores the important ways that telling and sharing patient's stories can lead to learning, empowerment, and advocacy. Part two explores several key forms of diversity and how they affect patienthood. Part three illustrates how personal, relational, and cultural aspects of identity intersect to shape the patient experience.
Chapter 1: Narrating Patient Experience: Benefits for multiple audiences
Chapter 2: From Stories to Discoveries: Patients' Narratives as Advocacy in Biomedical Research
Chapter 3: Cultural Communication Competency as a Two-Way Street: My Journey from Medical Avoidance to Patient Self-Advocacy
Chapter 4: Who will tell our stories? Emerging health legacies following the 2014-2016 Ebola Epidemic
Chapter 5: African Americans and Hospice Care: On Social Risk, Privacy Management, and Relational Health Advocacy
Chapter 6: Can You Please Direct me to a Doctor That Has a Heart?: A Stage 4 Breast Cancer Patient Narrative
Chapter 7: Exploring the Effects of Patient-Provider Communication on the Lives of Women with Vulvodynia
Chapter 8: Queer Patienthood
Chapter 9: An Autoethnographic Account of Navigating Patienthood as a Person with Hearing Impairment
Chapter 10: From Consumer to Community-Based Researcher: Lessons from the HIV Stigma Index
Chapter 11: The Gendered Nature of Generosity in Post-Hysterectomy "Dear Honey..." Letters
Chapter 12: The Narrative Journey and Decision-Making Process of Plastic Surgery Patienthood
Chapter 13: Narrative Sense-Making in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus
Chapter 14: Healthy mother, healthy baby: An Autoethnography to Challenge the Dominant Cultural Narrative of the Birthing Patient
Chapter 15: Abelist Biases
