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Somatisation: illness perspectives of asylum seeker and refugee patients from the former country of Yugoslavia

BACKGROUND: Somatisation is particularly challenging in multicultural contexts where patients and physicians often differ in terms of their illness-related beliefs and practices and health care expectations. This paper reports on a exploratory study aimed at better understanding how asylum seeker an...

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Autores principales: Junod Perron, Noelle, Hudelson, Patricia
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2006
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1386680/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16480514
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2296-7-10
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author Junod Perron, Noelle
Hudelson, Patricia
author_facet Junod Perron, Noelle
Hudelson, Patricia
author_sort Junod Perron, Noelle
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Somatisation is particularly challenging in multicultural contexts where patients and physicians often differ in terms of their illness-related beliefs and practices and health care expectations. This paper reports on a exploratory study aimed at better understanding how asylum seeker and refugee patients from the former country of Yugoslavia who were identified by their physicians as somatising make sense of their suffering. METHODS: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 asylum seeker and refugee patients from the former country of Yugoslavia who attended the general medicine outpatient clinic of a Swiss teaching Hospital and were identified as presenting with somatisation. Interviews explored patients' illness perspectives and health care expectations. Interviews were audio taped, transcribed verbatim and analyzed to identify key themes in patients' narratives. RESULTS: Patients attributed the onset of symptoms to past traumatic experiences and tended to attribute their persistence to current living conditions and uncertain legal status. Patients formulated their suffering in both medical and social/legal terms, and sought help from physicians for both types of problems. CONCLUSION: Awareness of how asylum seeker and refugee patients make sense of their suffering can help physicians to better understand patients' expectations of the clinical encounter, and the particular nature and constraints of the patient-provider relationship in the context of asylum.
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spelling pubmed-13866802006-03-02 Somatisation: illness perspectives of asylum seeker and refugee patients from the former country of Yugoslavia Junod Perron, Noelle Hudelson, Patricia BMC Fam Pract Research Article BACKGROUND: Somatisation is particularly challenging in multicultural contexts where patients and physicians often differ in terms of their illness-related beliefs and practices and health care expectations. This paper reports on a exploratory study aimed at better understanding how asylum seeker and refugee patients from the former country of Yugoslavia who were identified by their physicians as somatising make sense of their suffering. METHODS: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 asylum seeker and refugee patients from the former country of Yugoslavia who attended the general medicine outpatient clinic of a Swiss teaching Hospital and were identified as presenting with somatisation. Interviews explored patients' illness perspectives and health care expectations. Interviews were audio taped, transcribed verbatim and analyzed to identify key themes in patients' narratives. RESULTS: Patients attributed the onset of symptoms to past traumatic experiences and tended to attribute their persistence to current living conditions and uncertain legal status. Patients formulated their suffering in both medical and social/legal terms, and sought help from physicians for both types of problems. CONCLUSION: Awareness of how asylum seeker and refugee patients make sense of their suffering can help physicians to better understand patients' expectations of the clinical encounter, and the particular nature and constraints of the patient-provider relationship in the context of asylum. BioMed Central 2006-02-15 /pmc/articles/PMC1386680/ /pubmed/16480514 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2296-7-10 Text en Copyright © 2006 Perron and Hudelson; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Junod Perron, Noelle
Hudelson, Patricia
Somatisation: illness perspectives of asylum seeker and refugee patients from the former country of Yugoslavia
title Somatisation: illness perspectives of asylum seeker and refugee patients from the former country of Yugoslavia
title_full Somatisation: illness perspectives of asylum seeker and refugee patients from the former country of Yugoslavia
title_fullStr Somatisation: illness perspectives of asylum seeker and refugee patients from the former country of Yugoslavia
title_full_unstemmed Somatisation: illness perspectives of asylum seeker and refugee patients from the former country of Yugoslavia
title_short Somatisation: illness perspectives of asylum seeker and refugee patients from the former country of Yugoslavia
title_sort somatisation: illness perspectives of asylum seeker and refugee patients from the former country of yugoslavia
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1386680/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16480514
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2296-7-10
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