BMJ  2007;334:538 (10 March), doi:10.1136/bmj.39146.492870.59

Views & reviews

Outside the box

Best wishes for your incurable illness

Trisha Greenhalgh

University College London

p.greenhalgh@pcps.ucl.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

"Get well soon" is a greeting from a bygone era, in which illness was generally acute and self limiting. These days, those of us on the shady side of 40 are as likely as not to have at least one disease that will not go away, and those over 65 have an average of three. A rising stack of policy documents seeking to address the needs of people who are never going to get better emphasises self efficacy, concordance, expert patienthood, peer support, and personal care plans, while professionals are taught to hang loose, applaud self management, and focus their efforts on the few who have advanced disease and rare complications.

The ill are no longer called "patients," since this term aligns with an outdated view of the sick role first proposed by Talcott Parsons, in which we took to our beds and exchanged our normal social duties for the . . . [Full text of this article]


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