Feminist Perspectives in Medical Family Therapy - 9780789025470

Reinforce the relationship between healthy bodies and healthy relationships in families!

Feminist Perspectives in Medical Family Therapy explores the groundbreaking collaboration of therapy and medicine to form a biopsychosocial approach to health care. In this book, feminists from several fields of study offer their ideas, research, and personal experiences to show how gender, culture, and other diversity issues affect medical treatment. This invaluable tool provides tips and suggestions for interdisciplinary medical teams working with patients’ bodies, minds, spirits, and relationships simultaneously.

Medical family therapy is a relatively new specialty, and this book demonstrates its advantages and opportunities with an easy-to-understand, applicable approach. Clinicians, researchers, trainers, and students in medicine, social work, family therapy, psychology, and others can use Feminist Perspectives in Medical Family Therapy to examine more closely the medical issues that are most relevant to women and families. In this unique resource, you’ll learn about:

• how both biological factors and environment create gender differences—and how they apply to women with depression
• how the issues of power and gender influence the experiences of male and female medical family therapists
• incorporating feminist principles in family medicine education
• the benefits of collaborative care to both physicians and patients in a family medicine setting
• using couples therapy in cases of vulvar vestibulitis syndrome
• how a woman’s diagnosis of cancer affects the family system

Feminist Perspectives in Medical Family Therapy offers a variety of viewpoints from patients and providers, using hard data, interviews, practicum models, case examples, and reflections on personal experiences.