Communication is humanity’s oldest tool to understand each other and the things around us. Today, we are accustomed to fundamental mechanisms, which in this case will be metaphors and our understanding of how they can make our pain, illness, or disease easier to cooperate with. Metaphors are crucial to physicians who use them to explain to their patients the illnesses they might have, which can prove to be troublesome and difficult to converse about. In the medical field, metaphors can have a negative effect because they distort the reality of the situation that patients are in.
However, metaphors can make it easier for patients to cooperate with their suffering, pain, disease, or illness by obscuring their understanding of their circumstances. This illumination can be seen when analyzing two metaphors used in the medical field: the ideas of “illness as a puzzle” and ‘physicians are controlled agents.’ The first metaphor that will be discussed is ‘illness is a puzzle’ from Arthur W. Franks’ The Wounded Storyteller. There are many narratives that are discussed in this storytelling. The ‘quest narrative’ can be used to simplify this metaphor.
As stated by Frank, ‘quest stories meet suffering head-on; they accept illness and seek to use it.’ Frank elaborates that the journey taken by a patient who suffers from a disease can eventually become a quest for that person, and there is much information to be gained from the patient’s ongoing experience with the illness. Therefore, it is important to recognize the quest narrative because it is about living a life that has a purpose and meaning despite the illness, pain, or suffering. It can be perceived as consisting of a spiritual journey during which the person accepts his situation and learns to tell a story that has hope and fulfillment.
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While it can be puzzling for a patient to start a long journey towards accepting an illness, the patient learns to fight and always hope for the best. It is useful to have a metaphor like “illness is a puzzle” to describe an unknown situation because we can use various ways and different lifestyles for ourselves depending on how we solve our puzzle. In the medical case, the solving of the puzzle would be to treat your illness which requires a lot of pieces to come together to give you the best outcome.
On the other hand, there can be some negative effects of comparing illness to a puzzle; Motivation and purpose are needed to go into solving the puzzle. We often refer to things as puzzling or we are puzzled by something, a puzzle can be very large and curious situation which stops us dead in our way because we don’t know what to do. Another negative effect can be that the puzzle is always solvable, and, in some cases, this cannot be true, which creates a wrong sense of hope. People then get the idea that the cure is somewhere out there, and we just must put the pieces together and we will be cured. This creates an illumination for the patient that one day everything will be back to normal and this may not always be true.
There are Detached puzzle pieces, no idea of the outcome it would create if the puzzle were to be linked. The second metaphor that will be discussed is ‘physicians are controlled agents.’ In today’s society, we view most physicians as robotic workers who are employed by the government and trained to give certain treatments and conversations to their patients. This enables physicians to be in power because they dictate the patients’ reality and how they can improve it with their own techniques.
Physicians and patients possess very different information; trust is a key factor on both sides and patients often benefit from cooperation among physicians. The economist “Kenneth Boulding” discusses three types of control systems in society, which leads to a system called integrative system in “which people do things because of who they are and what their relationship is to others”. Medical care can be looked at as an integrative system when viewing responsibilities between the physicians and the patients. Health is worked on by the co-working of the patients and physicians.
A good integrative system can result in good medical care. Medical metaphors not only create a mental idea that can better help someone manage with their illness but can reduce the actual illness through the wide ideas of the metaphor. Through this standpoint, the patient can feel as if they are in control of their illness instead of being a powerless victim. There are some issues with this metaphor. Firstly, it can give too much power to physicians that will cause the patients to listen because they need to get better at any cost, which can result in overcharges and unnecessary steps that can easily be avoided.
To some extent, physicians are not willing to step up to the plate of exploding costs and managing reasonably good quality care. Looking at these two metaphors we can view that puzzles are common in the medical field because it sometimes it hard for the physician to explain to the patient of their suffering and how to find a way to cure if there is any. Secondly the patient will also be puzzled of the journey of battling this suffering that has yet to come.
Physicians being control agents comes in to effect because it can obscure the reality of an individual that is suffering from pain or any diseases, they dedicate the patient’s future in ways. In this way, the person has no authority over what is happening to their body. It can be puzzling to find cure for the illness and its large scale of wide and various ways to go about it. To put together the pieces that are already detached by the help of the physician dictatorship over the suffering of the induvial, which the outcome is unknown till one goes through the process of linking the pieces together.
Metaphors are can be our biggest ally or our biggest enemy. They can obscure and illuminate our understanding of pain, suffering or diseases. As we learned that metaphors are crucial to physicians who use them to explain to their patients the illnesses they might have. There are negative and positive effects in this nature of using metaphors, nonetheless the are great way of communication in todays medical field. We are puzzled of the situation that we can be put in and to find our way out we must fight the odds and have the positive mind set for the journey that has yet to come.
As discussed, you can view the obscurity in todays medical field by analyzing the two metaphors “illness as puzzle” and “physicians are control agents”. It can make commutation much simpler for the patient or certain individual. On the other hand, it become very confusing as well when interpreting the metaphors. Metaphor illuminate the truth to the individual, so it can be easier to comprehend. These are the interesting and oddly metaphors that truly help portray what society often believes and pushes on people today.
