Interventions' Effectiveness in Breast Cancer - Essay Sample

Introduction

A systematic literature review primarily selects, identifies, and appraises research critically to provide answers, supportive information, and clarify formulated questions (Gibbons and Groarke, 2016). The literature review always occupies chapter II of research proposals and projects. It is an imperative element in research. A systematic and transparent literature review is critical in Health and social care since it keeps researchers in tandem with the latest research and provides a platform to sharpen their wits and understanding about the already existing medical remedies and insight to discover new ones. Illness perceptions contribute a great deal to patients' behavioural outcomes and Management of breast cancer patients, such as distress, satisfaction with medical care offered, quality of life, and traditional healers' consultation (Sawyer, Harris, and Koenig, 2019). Therefore, this paper underscores a systematic literature review on the illness Perceptions in women concerning Breast Cancer Management and Treatment and its effects on treatment interventions' effectiveness.

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Medical Management

The response of women with breast cancer to medical Management and the disease symptoms varies from one woman to another. The self-management and coping behaviours vary or depend on their cognitions or views and emotions or feelings regarding the illness and its symptoms (Gibbons and Groarke, 2016, p.18). Breast cancer is an illness that develops from the breast tissues. The disease caused by a change or gene mutation develops in the breast mainly through the milk duct and is known as one of the leading killer diseases in the world today.

Cancer is an illness that attacks everyone, be it male and female, and exists in various forms as cancer of the skin, cancer of the lung, prostate cancer, and our aim, which is breast cancer. Therefore, in this case, our study population or the target population is the women; hence, articles were addressing women with breast cancer (Antoni, 2000, p. 36). The study reviewed various interventions to recover from breast cancer, such as psychological counseling, chemo treatment, radiography, operations, and proved futile at some point. Furthermore, the review-undertaken screening and comparison of different articles addressing different issues contribute to the failure of self-medication and treatment complications.

During the analysis, thorough scrutiny of attitudes, perceptions, emotions, feelings, and views obtained from different articles was analyzed, and illness perception was a significant determinant of self-medication and recovery from the disease as others perceived its best treated by a traditional herbalist (Andersen et al., 2008). Therefore, this systematic literature review has the central objective of answering this research question: what factors contribute to less effectiveness of breast cancer management strategies or medical interventions in facilitating healing and recovery in women. What are the effects of illness perception in breast cancer management and treatment?

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

Studies of Journal articles that proved eligible for inclusion qualitatively investigated patients' views, experiences, perceptions, and attitudes for health care services for breast cancer. A date restriction of 20 years range was imposed on the Journal articles searching the relevant document due to the many past studies conducted in the sector. Furthermore, the Cochrane qualitative methods group formed the qualitative research basis in this study, where both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods were utilized. The review included studies that investigated adult cases from ages 18 and above. The speculated age was believed to be experienced enough to give their views, perceptions, and attitudes towards breast cancer treatment strategies such as self-medication and illness symptoms. Restriction on gender was imposed during the search since even though cancer exists in a variety such as the cancer of the lung, skin, prostate, and stomach, and everyone, cancer of the breast attacks women only.

Identification of Relevant Studies

With the aid of both Google Search Engine, Google Scholar accessed various online databases with information on illness perceptions, views, attitudes, or the psychology of women with breast cancer, such as PubMed, ProQuest, and EMBASE Health Databases using the PICO process. I used various keywords such as Breast cancer, psychology, illness perception, Breast Cancer management, Treatment and Recovery, views, emotions, and cognition formulation to search for relevant information on most women's physiological views regarding their self-management practices about symptoms and treatment in nursing and medicine.

For more accurate information, I narrowed down to specific keywords, subjects, and date ranges using the advanced search option where I input journal articles, medicine, and nursing, articles published within the last ten years for publication type that is, years from the year 2000 to 2020, subjects, and date range, respectively. I finally narrowed down the search to the subject of illness perception and breast cancer in women. The process helped narrow down to various journal articles addressing illness perception in women who have cancer of the breast (Rees, Fry, Cull, and Sutton, 2004). Google Scholar is a more practical search tool. It provides details such as the article's publication and the referencing styles and citations.

Conclusion

The methodology used to identify and collect data in this systematic literature review is critical and appropriate as it meets the Critical Appraisal Skills Program (CASP) checklist elements. From the inclusion, state to the identification of the articles, the quality of the methodology used was prime since it not only availed the required data but also helped achieve the search's objective. Furthermore, the methodology was ensured that the review addressed the focused question clearly and facilitating the acquisition of the right type of articles with relevant studies to the research topic.

Notably, this section adopted a methodology based on systematic reviews of secondary data or previous literature on two phases. The first four steps are data identification and collection, as the last three data analysis and discussion, as illustrated in the figure below.

The first phase of the methodology, also called phase I, is a data identification and collection phase. Phase two in the stepwise process below is referred to as the data analysis and discussion phase.