Pain medicine is a complex field that has undergone significant evolution in recent decades regarding not just the practices and treatments it employs but in the very definition of the field itself. Pain medicine is practiced by more than 20 different medical disciplines and subspecialties, and communication across these areas as researchers, practitioners, and policy makers strive to define the field and establish standards of practice can be complicated and contentious, even when addressing questions as fundamental as ...
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Pain medicine is a complex field that has undergone significant evolution in recent decades regarding not just the practices and treatments it employs but in the very definition of the field itself. Pain medicine is practiced by more than 20 different medical disciplines and subspecialties, and communication across these areas as researchers, practitioners, and policy makers strive to define the field and establish standards of practice can be complicated and contentious, even when addressing questions as fundamental as whether or not a particular pain-related medical condition, for example fibromyalgia, actually exists. Technical communications scholar S. Scott Graham has dived headlong into this environment to study the medical rhetoric that ultimately shapes the healthcare community's understanding of what pain medicine is, how it should be practiced and regulated, and how practitioner-patient relationships are best managed. He offers not only insightful analysis of how healthcare communications in pain medicine is effectively conducted, but also a new way for scholars to examine healthcare communications in other areas that combines aspects of traditional rhetorical theory with multiple ontologies theory as it has been developed recently in the field of science and technology studies.
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