scholarly journals Why do patients struggle with their medicines?—A phenomenological hermeneutical study of how patients experience medicines in their everyday lives

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. e0255478
Author(s):  
Joanne M. Fuller ◽  
Emmelie Barenfeld ◽  
Inger Ekman

Why do so many people struggle with their medicines despite decades of research on medicines taking? Research into how people experience medicines in their everyday life remains scarce with the majority of research in this area of focusing on whether or not people take their medicines as prescribed. Hence, this study used a phenomenological hermeneutical qualitative design to gain a deeper understanding of individuals’ perspectives on the lived experience of medicine-taking. Findings from this study highlight five main themes where participants experience medicines as: 1) life-saving and indispensable, 2) normal and a daily routine, 3) confusing and concerning, 4) unsuitable without adjustment, and 5) intrusive and unwelcome. These results can be the basis for mutually agreed prescribing through a co-creative approach that aims at enhancing open and honest dialogues between patients and healthcare professionals in partnership about medicines.

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 617-633 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merje Kuus

This article seeks to connect political geographic scholarship on institutions and policy more firmly to the experience of everyday life. Empirically, I foreground the ambiguous and indeterminate character of institutional decision-making and I underscore the need to closely consider the sensory texture of place and milieu in our analyses of it. My examples come from the study of diplomatic practice in Brussels, the capital of the European Union. Conceptually and methodologically, I use these examples to accentuate lived experience as an essential part of research, especially in the seemingly dry bureaucratic settings. I do so in particular through engaging with the work of Michel de Certeau, whose ideas enjoy considerable traction in cultural geography but are seldom used in political geography and policy studies. An accent on the texture and feel of policy practice necessarily highlights the role of place in that practice. This, in turn, may help us with communicating geographical research beyond our own discipline.


Author(s):  
Andre Cavalcante

Struggling for Ordinary exhibits how transgender participants are engaging with media culture to cope with, integrate into, and simultaneously disrupt the shared everyday world. In showing how queerness plays out on the ground, within the actual lives of trans people, the book aims to square queer theory with lived experience by documenting how queerness and ordinariness are not mutually exclusive. Rather, transgender individuals live very queer and very ordinary lives simultaneously. The conclusion theorizes this hybridity as the “queerly ordinary,” defining what the concept means and what’s at stake in its usage. It interrogates the “ideal queer subject,” a figure who embodies the apex of queer theoretical aspiration, and then shifts focus toward examining “lived queerness,” or how individuals mobilize and enact queerness in ways that work for them within the limitations and structures of their world. Finally, the conclusion elucidates the queerly ordinary as an expression of lived queerness, and explores how it can help us understand transgender experience with media and everyday life. Ultimately, the queerly ordinary is what the trans people in my study wanted to see represented in media, what they used technologies to achieve, and in the end, it is how they lived their everyday lives.


2020 ◽  
pp. medethics-2020-106499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Camporesi ◽  
Maurizio Mori

We report here an emerging dispute in Italy concerning triage criteria for critically ill covid-19 patients, and how best to support doctors having to make difficult decisions in a context of insufficient life saving resources. The dispute we present is particularly significant as it juxtaposes two opposite views of who should make triage decisions, and how doctors should best be supported. There are both empirical and normative questions at stake here. The empirical questions pertain to the available level of evidence that healthcare professionals would rather not be left alone with their ‘clinical judgments’ to make triage decisions, and to the accounts of distributive justice that doctors and healthcare professionals rely on, when making triage decisions. The normative questions pertain to how this empirical evidence should inform guidelines on how prioritisation decisions are made in a context of emergency, and who gets to have the authority to do so. This debate goes beyond the discussion of the care of critically ill patients with COVID-19 and has broader implications beyond the national context for the discussion of how to relieve moral distress in contexts of imbalances between healthcare resources and clinical needs of a population.


2021 ◽  
pp. 107780122199491
Author(s):  
Sofie Henze-Pedersen

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and thematic analysis, this article explores how violence is lived after violent events have taken place, and how it shapes women’s everyday lives post-separation. First, the analysis shows how violence is negotiated in the context of a women’s refuge, shaping women’s perceptions of themselves and their experiences. Second, it explores how the potential of violence taking place can influence women’s everyday lives, and third, how past acts of violence can become part of the present atmosphere of everyday life. This raises questions about the meaning of time in analyses of violence.


Author(s):  
Lars-Christer Hydén ◽  
Mattias Forsblad

In this chapter we consider collaborative remembering and joint activates in everyday life in the case of people living with dementia. First, we review past research of practices that scaffolds the participation of persons with dementia in everyday chores under different stages of dementia diseases. We do so by suggesting three analytical types of scaffolding: when the scaffolding practices (i) frame the activity, (ii) guide actions, or (iii) are part of repair activities. Second, we review two aspects of collaborative remembering that are especially important in the case of dementia: training of scaffolding practices, and the sustaining and presentation of identities through collaborative storytelling. Finally, theoretical and methodological tendencies of the research field are summarized and future research needs are formulated.


2021 ◽  
pp. medethics-2020-106969
Author(s):  
Joana Teles Sarmento ◽  
Cristina Lírio Pedrosa ◽  
Ana Sofia Carvalho

A public health emergency, as the COVID-19 pandemic, may lead to shortages of potentially life-saving treatments. In this situation, it is necessary, justifiable and proportionate to have decision tools in place to enable healthcare professionals to triage and prioritise access to those resources. An ethically sound framework should consider the principles of beneficence and fair allocation. Scientific Societies across Europe were concerned with this problem early in the pandemic and published guidelines to support their professionals and institutions. This article aims to compare triage policies from medical bodies across Europe, to characterise the process of triage and the ethical values, principles and theories that were proposed in different countries during the first outbreak of COVID-19.


2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 1026-1048 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timur Dadabaev

This paper is a contribution to the debate about how people in Central Asia recall Soviet ethnic policies and their vision of how these policies have shaped the identities of their peers and contemporaries. In order to do so, this paper utilizes the outcomes of in-depth interviews about everyday Soviet life in Uzbekistan conducted with 75 senior citizens between 2006 and 2009. These narratives demonstrate that people do not explain Soviet ethnic policies simply through the “modernization” or “victimization” dichotomy but place their experiences in between these discourses. Their recollections also highlight the pragmatic flexibility of the public's adaptive strategies to Soviet ethnic policies. This paper also argues that Soviet ethnic policy produced complicated hybrid units of identities and multiple social strata. Among those who succeeded in adapting to the Soviet realities, a new group emerged, known asRussi assimilados(Russian-speaking Sovietophiles). However, in everyday life, relations between theassimiladosand their “indigenous” or “nativist” countrymen are reported to have been complicated, with clear divisions between these two groups and separate social spaces of their own for each of these strata.


Author(s):  
Yoann Della Croce ◽  
Ophelia Nicole-Berva

AbstractThis paper seeks to investigate and assess a particular form of relationship between the State and its citizens in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, namely that of obedience to the law and its related right of protest through civil disobedience. We do so by conducting an analysis and normative evaluation of two cases of disobedience to the law: (1) healthcare professionals refusing to attend work as a protest against unsafe working conditions, and (2) citizens who use public demonstration and deliberately ignore measures of social distancing as a way of protesting against lockdown. While different in many aspects, both are substantially similar with respect to one element: their respective protesters both rely on unlawful actions in order to bring change to a policy they consider unjust. We question the extent to which healthcare professionals may participate in civil disobedience with respect to the duty of care intrinsic to the medical profession, and the extent to which opponents of lockdown and confinement measures may reasonably engage in protests without endangering the lives and basic rights of non-dissenting citizens. Drawing on a contractualist normative framework, our analysis leads us to conclude that while both cases qualify as civil disobedience in the descriptive sense, only the case of healthcare professionals qualifies as morally justified civil disobedience.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (Suppl. 1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Horgan

With modern-day medicine going the way it is - new developments, great science, the advent of personalised medicine and more - there's little doubt that healthcare can move in the right direction if everything is put in place to allow it to do so. But in many areas progress is being halted. Or at the very least slowed. Like it or not, many front-line healthcare professionals still do things the way they did things three decades ago, and are reluctant to adapt to new methods (assuming they are aware of them). Evidence exists that today's rapidly developing new medicines and treatments can positively influence healthcare in modern-day Europe, but a gap in education (also applying to patients and politicians), often exacerbated by “fake news” on the internet, is hampering uptake of new and often better methods, while even causing doubts about vaccines. More understanding at every level will inevitably lead to swifter integration of innovation into the healthcare systems of Europe. The time to look, listen and learn has come.


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