ABSTRACT
It may surprise you, but making sense of American healthcare today requires metaphors. You probably noted in the title of the book terms like “mapping,” “path,” and “21st century.” These are metaphors. Taking these familiar terms that usually refer to people finding their way and applying them to healthcare create a new perspective for you. As you looked at the title, you may have read “healthcare,” but you also read “mapping” and “path,” which you do not usually associate with healthcare. The familiar images of maps and paths brought to mind past experiences or thoughts of yourself looking at maps to try to find the path to a destination, and you applied them as metaphors to 21st century healthcare. You applied your sense of mapping and paths and created a mental image that made sense to you. That is essentially how metaphors work to help us interpret our world and healthcare. Now that you know what metaphors are-the application of familiar words, concepts, and images to something else that is unrelated in order to use that familiarity to interpret and create new understanding (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Goodwin 2013)—you are ready to use them to explore the map of healthcare and to find the path to the future.
