Illness
The patient's and the patient's community's lived, meaning-laden experience of feeling unwell — the disruption to roles and relationships, and the story told about why the sickness is happening. Arthur Kleinman distinguished illness from disease, the biomedical practitioner's construct of a biological malfunction, arguing that a patient can have a disease with no felt illness, or a profound illness experience with no detectable disease, and that competent care requires attending to both.