Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing

Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing. Cheryl Mattingly and Linda C. Garro. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. ix. 270pp.     

The Play is Now Reality: Affective Turns, Narrative Struggles, and Theorizing Emotion as Practical Experience

Discursive approaches to subjectivity have been critiqued most recently for its dismissal of a living body that moves and senses. While identity as performative has proven invaluable to contemporary cultural theory for its dynamic conceptualization of power in everyday practice, the emergence of what some scholars have named an “affective turn” has prompted calls for configuring the body as more than a complex set of significations, but also a vibrant energy field in perpetual emergence. Centered on an enacted story created by two clinical therapists and two South Asian immigrant domestic violence survivors during a therapeutic support group session, this paper brings the affective turn into dialog with narrative theory. I juxtapose two different readings of this clinical “performance.” One interpretation recognizes affect theory’s value for highlighting sensation and the virtual in moments of transformation. Nonetheless I argue it overlooks a lived history. Thus, using a specifically dramatistic approach to narrative, the second analysis stresses the importance of personal experience and meaning-making in strengthening the link between affect and subjectivity. In doing so, the case study also argues for emotion’s critical link to practical and moral experience.     

In Search of the Good: Narrative Reasoning in Clinical Practice

Based on ethnographic work among North American occupational therapists, I compare two forms of everyday clinical talk. One, 'chart talk, conforms to normative conceptions of clinical rationality. The second, storytelling, permeates clinical discussions but has no formal status as a vehicle for clinical reasoning. I argue that both modes of discourse provide avenues for reasoning about clinical problems. However, these discourses construct very different clinical objects and different phenomena to reason about. Further, the clinical problems created through storytelling point toward a more radically distinct conception of rationality than the one underlying biomedicine as it is formally conceived. Clinical storytelling is more usefully understood as a mode of Aristotle's practical rationality than the technical rationality of modern (enlightenment) conceptions of reasoning, [narrative, practical reasoning, clinical reasoning, ethics]     

血小板反应蛋白2的结构、功能以及在创伤愈合中的作用

本文主要介绍近年来针对血小板反应蛋白2结构和功能(尤其在创伤愈合方面)的研究进展。     

The Role of Recurrence Plots in Characterizing the Output-Unemployment Relationship: An Analysis

We analyse the output-unemployment relationship using an approach based on cross-recurrence plots and quantitative recurrence analysis. We use post-war period quarterly U.S. data. The results obtained show the emergence of a complex and interesting relationship.     

Hypothetical Outcome Plots Outperform Error Bars and Violin Plots for Inferences about Reliability of Variable Ordering

Many visual depictions of probability distributions, such as error bars, are difficult for users to accurately interpret. We present and study an alternative representation, Hypothetical Outcome Plots (HOPs), that animates a finite set of individual draws. In contrast to the statistical background required to interpret many static representations of distributions, HOPs require relatively little background knowledge to interpret. Instead, HOPs enables viewers to infer properties of the distribution using mental processes like counting and integration. We conducted an experiment comparing HOPs to error bars and violin plots. With HOPs, people made much more accurate judgments about plots of two and three quantities. Accuracy was similar with all three representations for most questions about distributions of a single quantity.     

Medical Oncology: Clinical Experience Over One Year

Over a one-year period, 167 patients with cancer were seen in a total of 1,931 clinic visits. Of these patients, 59 percent responded to therapy, with 20 percent achieving a complete response. The median duration of response was eight months (12+ months for complete responders, 7 months for partial responders), with only a two-month average survival for nonresponders. Seventy-seven deaths in clinic patients occurred for a death rate of 46 percent. Hospital tumor registry referrals rose 46 percent. The effect of early referrals, sources of referral, metastatic sites, chemotherapeutic drugs used, morbidity and type of therapy are also reviewed.     

Divination and Healing: Potent Vision

Divination and Healing: Potent Vision . Michael Winkelman and Philip M. Peek, eds. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004. viii + 295 pp.     

Healing and the invention of metaphor: The effectiveness of symbols revisited

In this essay, I argue that a theory of meaning adequate to account for the effectiveness of symbolic healing and psychotherapy requires some variant of the three concepts of myth, metaphor and archetype. Myth stands for the overarching narrative structures of the self produced and lent authority by cultural tradition. Archetype stands not for preformed ideas or images, but for the bodily-given in meaning. Metaphor occupies an intermediate realm, linking narrative and bodily-given experience through imaginative constructions and enactments that allow movement in sensory-affective quality space. This pluralistic perspective itself constitutes a middle-ground between constructivist and realist approaches to meaning that can integrate causal and interpretive models of symbolic healing.I am manipulating, says the Alchemist. No, you are dreaming, says Novalis. I am dreaming, says Novalis. No, you are manipulating. The reason for such a profound duality is that fire is within us and outside us, invisible and dazzling, spirit and smoke.     

Medicine and Morality in Haiti: The Contest for Healing Power

Medicine and Morality in Haiti: The Contest for Healing Power. Paul Brodwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 (cloth and paper), xvi. 240 pp.     

Information Properties of Naturally-Occurring Proteins: Fourier Analysis and Complexity Phase Plots

In previous work from this lab, the information in natural proteins was investigated with Ribonuclease A (RNase A) serving as the source. The signature traits were investigated at three structure levels: primary through tertiary. The present paper travels further by charting the primary structure information of about half a million molecules. This was feasible given abundant sequence archives for both living and viral systems. Notably, a method is presented for evaluating primary structure information, based on Fourier analysis and spectral complexity. Significantly, the results show certain complexity traits to be universal for living sources. Viruses, by contrast, encode protein collections which are case-specific and complexity-divergent. The results have ramifications for discriminating collections on the basis of sequence information. This discrimination offers new strategies for selecting drug targets.     

The Gift of Life: Female Spirituality and Healing in Northern Peru

The Gift of Life: Female Spirituality and Healing in Northern Peru. Bonnie Glass-Coffin. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. 256 pp.     

膝关节不稳对骨折愈合的影响(附3例临床分析)

目的:探讨膝关节不稳对骨折愈合的影响。方法:回顾性分析我院收治3例患者因早期未能准确诊治膝关节交叉韧带损伤,而导致同侧股骨干骨折术后不愈合的临床资料。我们从生物力学角度分析,交叉韧带对膝关节生理性制导及稳定作用,反之损伤后膝关节的生理运动一定程度的丧失,以及随之而来的载荷传导紊乱,从而导致膝关节不稳。膝关节不稳所引起骨折端应力改变,其对骨折愈合将产生怎样的影响。结果:如未能及时修复交叉韧带在患者股骨干骨折术后行CPM锻炼及部分负重行走时将传导以骨折断端以一种剪切、旋转的应力,同时下肢垂直的纵向压应力将难以传导至骨折端,可能导致股骨干骨折术后的延缓愈合甚至不愈合。结论:膝关节不稳定可引起同侧肢体骨折端的应力改变,可能导致骨折的延缓愈合甚至不愈合。