Using root metaphors to analyze communication between nurses and patients: a qualitative study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Metaphors in communication can serve to convey individuals' backgrounds, contexts, experiences, and worldviews. Metaphors used in a health care setting can help achieve consensual communication in professional-patient relationships. Patients use metaphors to describe symptoms, or how disease affects them. Health professionals draw on shared understanding of such metaphors to better comprehend and meet patient needs, and to communicate information that patients can more easily integrate into their lives. This study incorporated a theoretical framework based on four worldviews, each with an underlying foundational metaphor (root metaphor). The use of these root metaphors (formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism) can have an explanatory function and serve to impar

SUBMITTER: Alvarez I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5689157 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature