'Using stories from patients' lives and embellishing them through personal insights and the writings of clinicians, authors and philosophers, Dr Broom breaks through the constraints of traditional biomedicine and opens the door to truly understanding the personal meaning of illness and disease. This book is a valuable addition for those who are open to acquiring insights into mind-body interactions.' - Douglas A. Drossman MD, Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry; Co-Director, UNC Center for Functional GI and Motility Disorders, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill'Professor Broom has long been at the forefront of mind-body health issues in New Zealand and was instrumental in establishing The MindBody Trust. He has given us what is quite simply a superb book, arising as it does from his commitment to a most honest, rigorous and integrated understanding of the personhood of his patients and the frameworks through which their disease processes and histories are interpreted. He explores issues that are problematic in our current viewpoints about human health and offers a much more coherent understanding of illness and its resolution that encompasses all aspects of what it is to be human. This very approachable book deserves to be very widely read and should be essential reading for all medical and other health practitioners, and biomedical scientists.' - Roger Booth, PhD, Associate Professor, Academic Director School of Medical Sciences, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Brian Broom, MBChB, FRACP, MSc (Imm), MNZAP, leads the post-graduate programme in MindBody Healthcare in the department of psychotherapy at the Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. He works as a consultant physician (immunology), psychotherapist, and MindBody specialist in the department of immunology at Auckland City Hospital, New Zealand. His previous books are 'Somatic Illness and the Patient's Other Story' and Meaning-Full Disease: How Personal Experience and Meanings Cause and Maintain Physical Illness'.

Contents1 The phenomena 2 Colliding mind-sets 3 Somatic metaphors 4 Language-making and disease 5 Meaning-full disease explorers 6 Disease as communication 7 Who 'sees' meaning-full disease? 8 Meaning-full disease and the lebenswelt 9 Meaning-full disease and the 'visible' 10 Shifting awareness and different kinds of body 11 The scheming body 12 Experience as a 'fundamental' 13 Meaning-full disease and spirit BIBLIOGRAPHY