How can the insights from the previous chapters be translated into everyday contexts and ordinary health care practice more specifically? How can practitioners and patients alike explore and evaluate the varied usability of metaphors? These questions are echoed in the calls for greater metaphor competence, metaphor literacy and metaphor reflexivity from the field of Medical Humanities (e.g. Bleakley 204; Holmes 272; Reisfield and Wilson; Semino et al., ‘Online Use’ 6). While a number of studies do answer these calls, few ground their recommendations in established metaphor theory and analysis. This chapter departs from these studies by using metaphor theory and analysis and by spelling out five concrete steps. Each step is tied to specific actions and illustrated by metaphors used in clinical practice and health care. In the last section, I make a short excursion and add the role of symbols and similes to this book’s privileging of metaphor.

The method I am proposing here is not a new invention. By contrast, it heavily draws on established methods such as close reading and metaphor analysis. And yet, these methods have largely remained exclusive to textual or cultural analysis. In other words, the value of this chapter does not lie in novelty but in laying out as clearly as possible a method of how metaphors can critically and mindfully be engaged with. That this method may result in a more skilled and reflexive use of metaphors seems reasonable, but, at this stage, it is a hypothesis that requires empirical research.

In shifting my focus from literary writers to the ways metaphors are used by patients and health care providers in everyday contexts, I suggest that a creative engagement with metaphors is not unique to professional writers or literary critics. Rather, as the following examples show, creative uses of metaphor take place in non-literary contexts, too, and therefore this chapter addresses readers who are engaged in health care – as practitioners, patients, relatives and researchers.

METAPHORS IN PRACTICE: GUIDELINES AND RECOMMENDATIONS

A critical, creative and mindful engagement with metaphors has many benefits. For one, a health care practitioner who pays close attention to a patient’s language can use this information to build an interpersonal relationship with the patient.