ABSTRACT
This chapter intends to trace some of the ramifications as well as the peculiarities of how patients participate in the managing and shaping of their own trajectories, whether that participation is seen by themselves or others as actually being work. If the trajectories produced by medical intervention are stretched out or have novel phases, or if the illness affects other physiological systems, then the maintenance of patterns of normal living may be complicated. The chapter focuses on the teacher responding to presumed or known needs, and on the other, the patient is required to learn certain necessary things. It also focuses on chronic illness allied with the teaching perspective would literally demand that the teachers seek sources for their own learning in patient's experiential work at home and in the hospital. "Teaching the patient" is translatable into getting the patient either to work or to work more effectively in his or her own behalf, largely through negotiation and persuasion.
