ArticleBMC palliative care2020
Battle, Journey, Imprisonment and Burden: patterns of metaphor use in blogs about living with advanced cancer.
Article in BMC palliative care, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- War and Cancer: Exploring Patient Narratives in a Randomized Integrative Oncology Study.Psycho-oncology · 2025Trial
- End-of-life care perceptions among nursing students: a thematic study.BMC nursing · 2026Article
- Palliative care: a foreign language? Nurses' perspectives on palliative care in a French comprehensive cancer centre.BMC palliative care · 2025Article
- Metaphor as methodology: Methodological reflections on visualizing the dementia journey.Dementia (London, England) · 2025Article
- "My Mom Is a Fighter": A Qualitative Analysis of the Use of Combat Metaphors in ICU Clinician Notes.Chest · 2024Article
- The Traces of Cancer: A Metaphorical Understanding of the Experiences of Women Living Beyond Breast Cancer.Qualitative health research · 2024Article
- Article
- Abdominal wall hernia and mental health: patients lived experiences and implications for patient care.Hernia : the journal of hernias and abdominal wall surgery · 2023Article
- "More than conquerors": a qualitative analysis of war metaphors for patients with cancer.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2022Article
- Cancer Prevention Sense Making and Metaphors in Young Women's Invented Stories.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Two wars on one front: Experiences of gynaecological cancer patients in the COVID-19 pandemic.European journal of cancer care · 2022Article
- Everyday discrimination and cancer metaphor preferences: The mediating effects of needs for personal significance and cognitive closure.SSM - population health · 2022Article
- "Your Ovaries Are Expired, Like an Old Lady" Metaphor Analysis of Saudi Arabian Women's Descriptions of Breast Cancer: A Qualitative Study.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The incurable metastatic breast cancer experience through metaphors: the fight and the unveiling.International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2021Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundThe significance of metaphors for the experience of cancer has been the topic of extensive previous research, with "Battle" and "Journey" metaphors standing out as key. Adaptation to the patient's use of metaphor is generally believed to be an important aspect of person-centered care, especially in palliative care. The aim of this study was to investigate the use of metaphors in blogs written in Swedish by people living with advanced cancer and explore possible patterns associated with individuals, age and gender.
methodsThe study is based on a dataset totaling 2,602,479 words produced some time during the period 2007-2016 by 27 individuals diagnosed with advanced cancer. Both qualitative and quantitative procedures were used, and the findings are represented as raw frequencies as well as normalized frequencies per 10,000 words. Our general approach was exploratory and descriptive. The Mann-Whitney U test was used to analyze statistical significance.
resultsOur results confirm the strong foothold of "Journey" and "Battle" metaphors. "Imprisonment" and "Burden" metaphors were also used by the majority of the individuals. The propensity to use metaphors when describing the cancer experience was found to differ extensively across the individuals. However, individuals were not found to opt for one conceptualization over the other but tended to draw on several different metaphor domains when conceptualizing their experience. Socio-demographic factors such as age or gender were not found to be strong predictors of metaphor choice in this limited study.
conclusionsUsing a range of different metaphors allows individuals with advanced cancer to highlight different aspects of their experience. The presence of metaphors associated with "Journey", "Battle", "Imprisonment" and "Burden" across individuals could be explained by the fact that the bloggers are part of a culturally consistent cohort, despite variations in age, sex and cancer form. Awareness of metaphors commonly used by patients can enhance health professionals' capacity to identify metaphorical patterns and develop a common language grounded in the patients' own metaphor use, which is an important requisite for person-centered palliative care.
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