Postmodernism for healthcare workers in 13 easy steps

Despite a growing literature on postmodernism in nursing and other healthcare disciplines, it continues to be dogged by mistrust, misunderstanding and outright hostility. Presenting the philosophy of postmodernism is a particularly difficult task, and most attempts fall into one of two traps: either the writer is a well-read and committed postmodernist in which case the writing tends to make too many assumptions about the background knowledge of the reader; or else the writer has only a passing knowledge of 'popular' postmodernism, in which case the writing often falls back on over-simplistic concepts which do not do justice to the issues and which are often completely misconceived. The problem is further compounded by the difficulty of writing about one discourse (I am using the word in its postmodern sense-all such 'jargon' is explained in the paper) from within a different and potentially hostile one. For the postmodernists, rational debate with their modernist colleagues is all but impossible, since (as we shall see) the logic and language of the dominant discourse of modernism rules out and refuses to acknowledge that of postmodernism (and vice versa). Postmodern texts therefore rely less on rational argument than on persuasive narrative and a deliberate subversion of many of the usual practices of writing. This introduction to postmodernism for healthcare workers attempts to straddle the two discourses in both its form and its content, and offers a mixture of argument, example and speculation.