Biosemiotic Medicine

Healing in the World of Meaning

Farzad Goli

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783319350912
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319350929
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Public Health, Administration & Care
• Index: Psychology

This book presents an interpretation of pharmaceutical, surgical and psychotherapeutic interventions based on a univalent metalanguage: biosemiotics. It proposes that a metalanguage for the physical, mental, social, and cultural aspects of health and medicine could bring all parts and aspects of human life together and thus shape a picture of the human being as a whole, made up from the heterogeneous images of the vast variety of sciences and technologies in medicine discourse. The book adopts a biosemiotics clinical model of thinking because, similar to the ancient principle of alchemy, tam ethice quam physice, everything in this model is physical as much as it is mental. Signs in the forms of vibrations, molecules, cells, words, images, reflections and rites conform cultural, mental, physical, and social phenomena. The book decodes healing, dealing with health, illness and therapy by emphasizing the first-person experience as well as objective events. It allows readers to follow the energy-information flows through and between embodied minds and to see how they form physiological functions such as our emotions and narratives.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Semiotic Approach to the Placebo Responses
• Chapter 2: Cybersemiotics as a Transdisciplinary Model for Interdisciplinary Biosemiotic Pharmacology and Medicine
• Chapter 3: Some Reflections on Non-substance Bound Healing Effects and the Concept of Narrative Medicine
• Chapter 4: How Can We Reconstruct the Health Anticipation?
• Chapter 5: The Ritual Effect: The Healing Response to Forms and Performs
• Chapter 6: Hypnosis, Placebo, and Performance: Recovering the Relational Aspects of Medicine
• Chapter 7: How to Prescribe Information: Health Education Without Health Anxiety and Nocebo Effects
• Chapter 8: Making Sense in the Medical System: Placebo, Biosemiotics, and the Pseudomachine
• Chapter 9: Medical Practice in/with the Semiosphere
• Index