The postmodern experience of illness begins when ill people recognize that more is involved in their experiences than the medical story can tell. The loss of a life's map and destination are not medical symptoms, at least until some psychiatric threshold is reached. The scope of modernist medicinedefined in practices ranging from medical school curricula to billing categories-does not include helping patients learn to think differently about their post illness worlds and construct new relationships to those worlds.

(Arthur W. Frank "The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics")