Finding Purpose: Honing the Practice of Making Meaning in Medicine

Finding Purpose: Honing the Practice of Making Meaning in Medicine.

Despite decades of advances in diagnosing and treating a broad range of illnesses, many changes in our health care system impede true caregiving, leaving patients and practitioners dissatisfied and creating an emotional burden for practitioners that contributes to the staggering rates of physician burnout. Given this dissatisfaction and disconnection, practitioners and patients alike can benefi...

Academic medicine and the search for meaning and purpose.

The transformation of the health care industry into a marketplace governed by commercialism and free competition challenges the doctrine of medicine as a profession valuing service to the patient above financial reward. Many physicians have become disenchanted with their ability to serve as advocates for and provide care to their patients. Financial success, the measure of the marketplace, has ...

Making Pilgrimages, Meaning and Practice in Shikoku

The Five “A”s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making

ion Compensatory affirmation is not the only way in which we can fluidly compensate for a meaning violation—sometimes we will find meaning when unrelated understandings are threatened. If we are looking to our environment to identify something—anything—that can be rendered familiar, the kinds of expected associations that we will draw or abstract may push the limits of fluid compensation even f...

Finding peace and joy in the practice of medicine.

Although they are healers, physicians are not themselves immune from "secondary stress." In fact, they may be more susceptible to it because they tend not to acknowledge the fact that it exists. In this article, the author, a hospice physician who is a former nurse, explains her personal strategy for combating secondary stress: increased emphasis on maintaining a healthy personal spirituality. ...