ABSTRACT
Research into health and health care has achieved substantial advancement in knowledge and improvements in care, through its focus on interventions, treatment and cure. On the one hand it is evident that increasing specialisation alongside technological advances and research have improved health and well-being. On the other hand there is increasing evidence in the media, and from qualitative research in particular, that the human dimensions of care can be obscured by a sometimes necessary technological and specialised focus. Charon (2006) speaks of the “vexing failures of medicine – with its relentless positivism, its damaging reductionism, its appeal to the sciences and not to the humanities in the academy, and its wholesale refusal to take into account the human dimensions of illness and healing” (p. 193).
