Browsing by Author "Madden, Helen"

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    Integrative medicine : a contested practice : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2012) Madden, Helen
    In contemporary Western society, the healthcare arena has become increasingly technology-based, rationalised and specialised with alternative forms of medicine being taken up alongside orthodox medicine. This shifting healthcare terrain has brought forth challenges to practitioners' and patients' identity and to the practitioner-patient relationship. Today, the expertise and autonomy underpinning general practitioners' professional identity has been challenged. In parallel, patients have become reconceptualised from subjects in need of medical expertise, to 'informed' and 'active' health consumers. Within this fluid healthcare arena integrative medicine (IM) is emerging, a practice which amalgamates orthodox medicine with forms of alternative medicine. This emerging form of healthcare produces a number of paradoxes. These occur around the paradigm clash between treatment philosophies, issues of professionalism and the standardisation of treatments, power relationships and debates around dominance and subordination, and issues relating to patient autonomy and treatment responsibility. A discursive analysis of IM practitioners' and patients' talk reveals that the practice of IM gives rise to a number of contradictions and challenges for both IM practitioners and patients. Practitioners draw on discourses of holism, liberal humanism, spirituality and empowerment to construct IM as a healthcare model which maintains elements of both allopathic and alternative medicine in place, but also to legitimate practices inherent in IM. Through doing so, they reconstruct their medical professional identity. In conjunction, patients' draw on practitioners' extended knowledge-base and open-mindedness to construct IM practitioners as trustworthy professionals and to legitimate their own engagement in exploratory forms of treatment. This has implications for patients' and practitioners' subjectivity. Patients become individuals who deserve to be understood on a multitude of levels: psychologically, spiritually, emotionally and physically through which they gain recognition. Concurrently, practitioners' become placed in a paradoxical position with respect to their practice. They resolve this by resisting the position of biomedical expert and by incorporating a range of alternative medicine treatments to extend the healthcare they offer to patients. In conclusion, the practice of IM is shown to legitimate patients' engagement in self-reflexivity practices and to reproduce Cartesian dualism. Further, the research reveals how discourses of holism and empowerment, that are held to represent the fundamental difference between allopathic and alternative medicine, are drawn on by practitioners to legitimate a more in depth practice and a deeper level of engagement with patients. Finally, the research questions whether IM constitutes a truly 'integrative' medicine.
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    Nutritional health messages : a conflictual space for women : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University
    (Massey University, 2003) Madden, Helen
    Several health-threatening diseases (e.g., stroke, diabetes, heart disease) are believed to be attributable in part to inadequate nutritional intake. Individuals' dietary practices have thus been construed as a problem and have become a public health issue. Consequently, nutritional health messages constituting a 'healthy diet' have become increasingly widespread. Women's magazines provide a key source through which nutritional health information is disseminated. To date, psychological research into individuals' dietary practices has focused predominantly on how intra-psychic factors (e.g., attitudes, intentions) operate to bring about dietary choices. However, to the lay person, one's dietary choices are not based solely on a rational cost-benefit analysis of the nutritional composition of foods for health maintenance reasons. Food has a multiplicity of meanings and signification which arise through interactions between individuals in the social sphere and are derived from the discursive construction of food and nutrition. The current study provides an analysis of those discourses that surround nutritional health messages featured in women's magazines. It also examines women's own meanings through an analysis of their accounts from focus group discussions about food, dietary practices, health and the media. Four discourses were identified in the media texts, moral, biomedical, scientific, and mothering. These four discourses were also drawn on in the women's talk, as was a discourse of feminine beauty. Together these constituted a discursive web that acts to position women as inexpert, uneducated, susceptible and immoral both as individuals and as mothers. Participants were shown to actively resist the discursive positioning afforded them, and in doing so, were seen to reject the claims made in nutritional health messages of food as health promoting. The results of this study problematise the conceptualisation that increasing individual knowledge around food and nutritional health is an effective means by which to engage people in healthy dietary practices.