Session 6a: Ethics, Research and Chronic Pain

Jane Appleton - Ethical Issues in Undertaking Narrative Research in Palliative Care

No abstract presently exists for this delegate.

Kay Price - Talking the Talk - Chronic Pain
Assistant Director, Centre for Research into Nursing and Health Care, Senior Lecturer, School of Nursing and Midwifery
Organisation: University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia 5000

My paper is an ethical and a political project that explores how chronic pain is given meaning and the implications this meaning has on current practices. How chronic pain is framed or how it is given meaning, has significant implications for the person identified as experiencing chronic pain and the health professionals working with this person. I want to address how it is possible to talk about chronic pain and why it is that pain can be categorized as chronic (is this to distinguish chronic from acute?). If talk is of chronic pain, from whose perspective will this be? How is chronic pain as an event made visible so that health professionals understand that all persons involved in making this event visible, are referring to the same event experienced by a person seeking the assistance of health professionals? My paper will offer commentary in relation to these questions. I will explore how framing of chronic pain both disciplines actions of health professionals and people acknowledged as experiencing the event chronic pain, to challenge representations of pain and pain expertise, that have come to exist as self-present truth. My paper is in part a critique of how health professionals construct chronic pain to understand how the subjectivity of a person identified as experiencing chronic pain is constituted in this construction. I argue how chronic pain has seemingly been made into a form that makes chronic pain both knowable and governable. In opening out alternate understandings of pain and chronic pain, and readings of health professionals' actions, the paper allows for the possibility that pain and chronic pain, and the way that health professionals act in relation to that pain, may indeed mean different things to different people.

Susan Mills - The Paradox of Health within Illness: Perspectives on Living Well with Chronic Conditions
Individual Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

An increasing number of individuals are being diagnosed with chronic illness, and are living with it in the context of their daily lives. Academic research, and autobiographical accounts reveal considerable diversity in the way individuals respond to, and ultimately live with, chronic illness on a day-to-day basis. Within this range of experiences, a number of individuals seem to live well despite the major challenges they face. In recent years, more and more chronic illness accounts reflect positive and optimistic types of experience that present interesting paradoxes in relation to traditional understandings of illness as a life long burden of suffering and pain, and in relation to considerable societal effort to prevent disease and find cures.

Different theoretical orientations on health and illness across health and social science disciplines provide a range of possible understandings from which we can try and make sense of this living well response to illness. Although important knowledge on chronic illness experience has been developed from many of these vantage points, individually they seem unable to provide a complete framework for gaining deeper insight into the complexities of the living well experience, and how it is created in the context of long-term conditions. This raises some important questions about current approaches to chronic illness research, and highlights the need for an interdisciplinary framework encompassing multiple theoretical perspectives to further knowledge on "living well with illness" experiences.