Exploring the Medical Interactions of Patients with Difficult-to-Diagnose or Uncertain Illnesses
About.
The overall purpose of this project is twofold. First, this project seeks to better understand and explicate the concept of dismissal (i.e., invalidation) of patients’ symptoms by clinicians (hereafter referred to as symptom invalidation) via analysis of patient narratives of relevant medical interactions. Second, upon elucidating and explicating the concept of symptom invalidation, this project seeks to develop and subsequently validate a reliable self-report measure—the Perceived Symptom Invalidation Scale (PSIS)—to allow for the assessment of patient-perceived symptom invalidation by clinicians and the examination of its correlations with patients’ physical and psychological health. Speaking to the second objective of this project, symptom invalidation has been observed in an abundance of qualitative work to be associated with a variety of negative psychological sequelae. These sequelae have important implications for patients’ psychological health. They also have implications for diagnosis and treatment and, consequently, disease burden and overall quality of life. As such, the construction and validation of a reliable self-report measure will allow for the quantitative testing of the negative correlates of symptom invalidation. Such results will be instrumental in establishing the importance of symptom invalidation in the medical interaction, with the hope of stimulating a corpus of study investigating its significance for mental and physical health patient outcomes and, ultimately, the need for interventions to address such a phenomenon in the medical interaction.
Faculty supervisors.
Lisa Mikesell, PhD
Katherine (Katya) Ognyanova, PhD
Maria K. Venetis, PhD
Anna M. Kerr, PhD
Katherine (Katya) Ognyanova, PhD
Maria K. Venetis, PhD
Anna M. Kerr, PhD