For our next meeting on Monday March 9, we’ll discuss the concept of “patient burden” and this article by Carl May and colleagues, “Rethinking the patient: using Burden of Treatment Theory to understand the changing dynamics of illness.” From the article:

The aim of this paper is to rethink what it means to be a patient in the age of chronic multi-morbidity. We need to better understand the resources that patients draw upon as they respond to the demands of both burdens of illness and burdens of treatment, and the ways these resources interact with healthcare utilization.

This article makes me think of two related texts on the subject of the role of patients with chronic illness:

• Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition 
• Annemarie Mol, The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice

How does this new theory of patient burden build on existing works and theories that you’re familiar with?