Illness and its experience: The patient perspective

Abstract

This chapter offers a philosophical analysis of the illness experience. It uses a phenomenological approach to study the experience of illness and describe its salient features. Using a phenomenological framework, the chapter looks at the physical and social world of the ill person and at changes to self-identity, time, and death. The chapter opens with Toombs’ definition of illness as a series of losses. It then turns to examine the experience of illness in terms of symptom experience, diagnosis, disease progression, and prognosis. I use Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich to exemplify the experiential dimension and existential meaning of each stage. I then provide an analysis of the experience of illness by breaking it down into the geography of illness, the social dimension of illness, and the experience of illness as disability, in order to provide an analysis of the first-person experience of illness.