Repository | Book | Chapter

There is an ethical landscape associated with the understanding and management of the person with chronic pain, which spans a range of structural, policy, educational and clinical issues. This ethical landscape has normative (what one ought to do…) and non-normative (what one actually does…) terrains. Healthcare providers and patients alike encounter a moral tension between these normative and non-normative ethical terrains. This moral tension, if unrecognized and unresolved, can have damaging effects on a person's sense of "self', sense of agency and therefore their ability to effectively participate in actions and activities required towards better health. The Ethical Reasoning Bridge is an ethical reasoning model that conceptualizes how healthcare providers can negotiate this normative and non-normative ethical landscape in terms of their decision-making in clinical practice. The use of narrative reasoning can assist healthcare providers to support patients to develop narrative capabilities (speaking, acting, telling and imputing personal responsibility for actions). If healthcare providers can learn to negotiate the normative and non-normative ethical terrains which form the landscape of chronic pain ethics, we can assist persons with chronic pain to develop narrative capabilities, and also identify "a wider moral space' (Kleinman in What really matters: living a moral life amidst uncertainty and danger. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) in which they can begin to resolve the moral dilemma they face in having to comply with the normative expectations of others at the cost of denying their own lived experience.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-49022-9_12

Full citation: