Who is afraid of Ockham's razor? : Adiscourse analysis on resilience in palliative care (2000-2021)

Abstract

The concept of resilience is becoming increasingly disseminated from material science into various fields of science. It is infiltrating medical fields predominantly via psychology and is also recommended for coping with the special burdens in pain management and palliative care. Aprecise definition of the term and its operationalization pose problems. Acritical stocktaking of the use of this term in the discourse of palliative care research. Analytical discourse analysis of atext corpus from palliative medical care publications in the time period from 2000 to 2021, obtained by means of asystematic literature search. In the research discourse of palliative care, resilience is atopic primarily as astrategy for self-optimization of employees (e.g., burnout prophylaxis with the aim of preserving the workforce). Only rarely does the question of whether it offers potential for patients and their families take center stage, and then more as acatchword than as aconcrete concept. The reason is that there is so far no adequate operationalization of the concept of resilience. Furthermore, there is alack of sufficient justification for the relevance of the concept in patient care of palliative medicine. There is alack of qualified contributions of palliative research to the metadiscourse about resilience, especially in the context of affected patients. A successful operationalization of the term requires a highly complex multidimensionality of the palliative path of an interdisciplinary approach. There is alack of ethical standards that prevent an affirmative instrumentalizing application of the term.