Breathing and Breathlessness in Clinic and Culture: Using Critical Medical Humanities to Bridge an Epistemic Gap

Excerpt

A central tenet of critical medical humanities is the claim that biomedicine does not hold all the keys to understanding the experience of illness, how responses to treatment are mediated, or how outcomes and prognosis are revealed over time. We further suggest that biomedicine cannot wholly explain how illness may be expressed physiologically. So much that influences that expression derives from cultural context, emotional response, and how illness is interpreted and understood that this knowledge cannot be exhausted with the tools of biomedicine.