CMH is pleased to annouce the latest article published from the Life of Breath Project in the Lancet Respiratory: Invisible suff ering: breathlessness in and beyond the clinic written by Havi Carel, Jane Macnaughton and James Dodd.
This article highlights, among other things, the importance for a research focus on breathlessness and how this research can impact clinical work. Breathing, the authors point out, while culturally significant becomes quickly pathologised into breathlessness in the respiratory clinic. In this clinical space what is commonly overlooked and poorly understood is ‘the phenomenological (experiential, subjective) understanding of breathing and of breathlessness and its cultural and metaphorical significance’. The Life of Breath Project aims to address a need for effective interdisciplinary research on both breathing and breathlessness in order to illuminate the understanding of these cultural and metaphorical points of signficance. Funded by the Wellcome Trust over 5 years, this project brings together a range of disciplines in order to make the invisible visible, to demonstrate the significance of breath as integral to the rhythm of life.