“Did she, on some level, feel she lost the battle because she didn’t fight hard enough.”
This complicates the metaphor because, you can’t really “fight” a disease. Yes there are ways of fighting a disease in a medical sense, however in a literal sense like “fist fighting” is not the case here. You can’t literally fight a disease in a physical sense. Overall, fighting a difficulty of the battle can’t exactly be in a literal sense but most people can breakdown the concept and really understand what’s going on.
“One study, from 2019, found that physicians use metaphors in almost two-thirds of their conversations with patients who have serious illnesses”.
This supports the prompt because there are many languages to a Doctors view of understanding. They have to breakdown deadly or very frightening diseases all the time in a simple metaphor that the patient can understand what it is, and also understand how threatening it is.
“More recent work has found that patients encouraged to “fight” may feel that they have to suppress their emotional distress and maintain a positive attitude to avoid upsetting family members”
There develops the concept of fighting because there have been in movies, comics, and anywhere in the news about patients being told to “fight” and in fact having better mortality rates.
Geary: “Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate, learn, discover and invent.“
I selected this quote from Geary, because in a literal sense, medical professionals have to use everyday metaphors in order to help explain conditions, diseases, viruses or illnesses to people in much simpler more understandable language. Metaphors are a way of communication, which is greatly and commonly used by physicians.
Erard: “At the same time, designers look for common conceptual domains in which analogical mappings are easy to find.”
Just like medical professionals, metaphor designers have to find simplistic meanings and context, so that the person who is processing and understanding the metaphor for the first time will have the ability to understand and relate to the metaphor to have more meaning and impact. Just like a doctor who tries to simplify the severity of a disease through metaphor.
I found your reference to movies and the news discussing high morality rates associated with fighting a disease really interesting. I had no idea about these kinds of studies outside this article. Additionally, I like the quote you chose from Geary since metaphors are extremely helpful in explaining the unknown.
You wrote: “There develops the concept of fighting because there have been in movies, comics, and anywhere in the news about patients being told to “fight” and in fact having better mortality rates.”
Elaborate on this. Provide details.
You began to build some good connections between Khullar, Erard, and Geary. It might be interesting to explore other potential metaphors for illness with “easy analogical mappings” in your paper.
Continue to work on expanding those annotations. You do a great job reading as a writer! Consider adding comments that rephrase the author’s main points. This will help you as a you later reference the text.