Source: Positive News
It can serve to rally and empower, but could ‘battling’ disease also be holding us back? Nathaniel Hughes, a medical herbalist, asks if it’s time to call a truce on war-like language in health
The process of healing is a journey, sometimes short and straightforward but often nuanced, complex and uncertain.
At best it teaches and inspires us; at worst it gradually wears us down as our faith in the possibility of getting better fades.The two metaphors in the previous sentence – that of illness as teacher and that of illness as an arduous slog – are both often shared with me in my clinic as people attempt to make sense of their experiences. In the same way that no healing journeys are the same, I don’t believe that there is a ‘right’ metaphor. But I do suspect that some metaphors serve us while others bind us.
Since 1971 and President Nixon’s ‘War on Cancer’, medicine has been permeated by the language of the battlefield. Despite unease about this metaphorical framing within the medical profession, the language seems to have spread. Apparently, there are ‘wars’ on diabetes, obesity, dementia and even – without a hint of irony – on antibiotic resistant bacteria. It’s as if all would be well if only our magic bullets were that bit more magic.
A study in 2015 in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin indicates some of the problems with this. “Results show that metaphorically framing cancer as an enemy lessens the conceptual accessibility of and intention for self-limiting prevention behaviours,” read part of the summing up.
For some, ‘fighting’ their addiction to food, tobacco or alcohol works. But…
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