Experiences of Illness and Narratives - Article Example

Illness narratives are not a casual description of disease manifestation in patients, but a multi-vocal expression of their encounter with the disease. Illness narratives are portrayed in ways that sociological context and analysis create sense in them. Sociology of medicine has experienced a gradual shift in patient management from a biomedical approach to narratives. Among the pressing factors for this development is the objectivity and subjectivity of the information generated by either of the approaches.

These two approaches have received criticism and support from both sociologist and biomedical professionals. In her article Bell argues that narratives provide subjective experience of the illness (which is a critical component of patient management) in contrast to mere objectivity of conventional biomedical approach (Susan, Bell 130-133). According to Bell traditional medical approach is insensitive to the social context of wellbeing and diseases and ignores fundamental life experiences of the patient in diseases.

These experiences include how they perceive and cope with their disease and the impact it has to their socioeconomic life. In contrast, narratives give the patient an official medical discourse where they open up their life illness experiences with the medical care givers (Bell Susan, p.138). However, narratives may have little or no significance in acute illnesses that hardly affect the entire life of a patient. In chronic and terminal illnesses, diseases, become an integral part of the patient’s life and narratives are handy tools in their management ( Susan, Bell 138-139).

For example, in a customary medical approach, a patient having an HIV infection can only have a limited contact to a care giver whose interest is the biomedical manifestation of the disease and not the sociological context of the patient. Another point addressed by Susan in the subjective understandings of diseases using narratives is that suffering remains an important component of illness or disease. However, suffering as an experience is hardly captured by traditional approaches to patient care that only focus on the disease entity.

Narratives, therefore, provide an avenue that can grasps the complex inner language of hurt, create knowledge about suffering and outline a moral plan of living with illness (Susan, Bell 139). For instance, majority of chronic disease patients experience stigma, depression and self denial, which significantly affects their overall wellbeing and prognosis. Therefore, an objective (biomedical) approach to their management (medical intervention) nay be ineffective, if, such factors are ignored. Medicalization also referred to as pathologization refers the process when human conditions and problems are identified and described as medical conditions that can be treated or resolved using a medical intervention.

In the early 1970s, this process was advanced by the expansion of the medical profession and jurisdiction, activities of social movements and interest groups as well as organized inter or intra professional activities (Peter Conrad 105). Once medicalized a condition becomes the focus of medical professional and pharmaceutical companies that engineer appropriate interventions. Over the years, medicalization has been promoted by a couple of factors among them being advancements in biotechnology (Peter, Conrad 106).

Biotechnology is a wide discipline whose aim is to improve the general health and wellbeing of human kind either directly or indirectly.