Background Foot involvement in rheumatoid arthritis has detrimental and far reaching implications for the lives of patients. Qualitative studies investigating this phenomenon have identified specific aspects of the lived experience pertaining to the foot. However, no studies have attempted to provide a holistic overview of this phenomenon or investigate the potential relationships between diffe...

The basis of a science of conduct must be fixed principles of action, enduring and stable motives. It is doubtful, however, whether this is fundamentally the character of human life. What men want is not so much to get things that they want as it is to have interesting experiences. And the fact seems to be that an important condition of our interest in things is an element of the unanticipated,...

This research examined the experiences of families living with a child with severe autism. There is limited literature on the experiences of families when a child has severe autism as distinct from milder autism and includes the voices of multiple family members. Van Manen's phenomenological approach was used for data collection and analysis. This approach allowed for the use of innovative data...

Smoking in pregnancy is associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes, such as low birth weight, preterm birth, and perinatal death. Despite widespread public awareness of the deleterious health effects of cigarette smoking, up to a quarter of women in developed countries smoke during their pregnancies. In this hermeneutic phenomenological study, the meaning and experience of smoking in pregnancy ...

BACKGROUND Sjögren's Syndrome is an autoimmune exocrinopathy characterised by lymphocytic infiltration of exocrine glands in multiple sites, with dry mouth as a primary presenting symptom. Although quantitative studies have shown the negative impact of both dry mouth and Sjögren's Syndrome on patients' quality of life, no qualitative diary and interview study has been undertaken to examine the ...