Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication

<p>This book explores how women make meaning at various health flashpoints in their lives, overcoming fear, anxiety, and anger to draw upon self-advocacy, research, and crucial decision-making.</p><p>Combining focus group research, content analysis, autoethnography, and textual inquiry, the book argues that the making and remaking of what we call “patient epistemologies” is a continual process wherein a health flashpoint—sometimes a new diagnosis, sometimes a reoccurrence or worsening of an existing condition or the progression of a natural process—can cause an individual to be thrust into a discourse community that was not of their own choosing.</p><p>This study will interest students and scholars of health communication, rhetoric of health and medicine, women’s studies, public health, healthcare policy, philosophy of medicine, medical sociology, and medical humanities.</p>