APPLIED NARRATIVE MEDICINE. WHEN PATIENTS NARRATE ABOUT THEMSELVES
APPLIED NARRATIVE MEDICINE. WHEN PATIENTS NARRATE ABOUT THEMSELVES

Summary/Abstract: When talking about the concept of illness and health, anthropology becomes an extremely applied science, imposing extremely tight collaborations between anthropologists and various professionals from the health department. During the last decade, anthropological research in the medical anthropology has expanded. We analyse: illness - not the patient’s suffering, the behaviour of individuals from the core of a society, the idea of returning to healing methods (considered or not) certain parallel or complementary set in therapeutic dialogue with allopathic medicine, initiation in the medical profession, the patient-doctor relationship, the patient’s relationship with their illness and their own bodies. This implies that we will always be analysing two types of thought process: on one hand traditional representations and practices and on the other hand the modern health system as it is implemented and as it functions in society, at a given time. The means by which a population tried to separate the dysfunction of the body or the deviation from the well-being of the whole, the answers every generation found and passed on cannot dissociate completely not even in the current modern biomedical system. From an anthropological point of view, a researcher of the cultural body such as Le Breton1 will always highlight the unique character of pain, the fact that the mere pronunciation of the word makes us think of a tear, of a “rupture” of the self. With no pretension of redefining a linguistic code of pain, however trying to understand what it is from the point of view of the contemporary patient, a fundamental concept in the study and treatment of any pathological condition, slightly understudied in Romanian anthropological research, we analysed a questionnaire consisting of 37 questions distributed to a group of patients made out of 28 women and 44 men, admitted to some of the university hospitals in Timisoara, involving them in a captivating narrative exercise.

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