Illness experience of Chinese patients with psoriasis: a dynamic balancing model.

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin disease due to dysregulation of the immune system. Its incurable nature implies a life-long treatment with tremendous pressure for patients including physical, psychological, emotional and social complications. OBJECTIVE: To understand lived experiences of psoriasis patients. METHOD: Twelve patients with psoriasis were invited for a semi-structured interview. Their illness experience in terms of the onset of disease, its impact on their daily life, treatment process and how they coped with the challenges was recorded. Data were examined by adopting the interpretative phenomenological analysis. RESULT: Three meta-themes emerged as most representative of their phenomenological experiences: 1) Surviving the chronicity of the disease, 2) Accepting the disease and illness experience as part of the life, and 3) Thriving with the new assumptive world. A conceptual model called Dynamic Balancing in elucidating illness experience was proposed. CONCLUSION: To maintain a balance between ill-being and well-being in the illness experience, informants took an effort to normalize and venture new living experiences. Instead of pathologizing the patients’ emotional and behavioral responses, the Dynamic Balancing model has delineated a reality of dynamic balancing on everyday life experience that the stage models have not been postulating.