American women are more likely to choose overly aggressive treatments for bre...(on dissemination and requirements for ph...),Health

Date:1/8/2008

on dissemination and requirements for physicians to discuss breast cancer treatments, women still do not translate this information into accurate risk assessments regarding their treatment options. Instead, they rely on stories of survivorship and restitution in constructing their risk understandings.

They continue: The impact of individual beliefs in restitution through aggressive detection and treatment is reflected in a broader sense by statistics on overall healthcare consumption in this country. From breast cancer and heart surgery to diabetes, numerous reports from general interest, business, and public health publications have raised concerns about the over-consumption of and runaway spending on medical treatments.

The researchers suggest that increased efforts in education and intervention alone will not be enough to offset these implicit cultural biases. In order to understand why patients often choose difficult and expensive treatments that may not necessarily yield improvements in their quality of life or odds of survival, they reveal that we must also consider the deeply entrenched illness narratives that frame patients interpretations of medical and risk information.

Illness narratives allow us to convey, express, and formulate our experiences of illness and suffering, thus providing a platform for shared cultural experiences, Wong and King write. We hope that this research will direct more attention to the recognition and conceptualization of these alternative discourses within an expanded composition of illness narratives.

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Contact: Suzanne Wu swu@press.uchicago.edu 209-608-2038 University of Chicago Press Journals Source:Eurekalert

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