Patient narratives of hope in stem cell technologies: Trust in biomedicine and the body's natural ability to heal itself.

The scholarship on patient hope in biomedical technologies describes two narratives of hope: the biomedical and the individual. The biomedical narrative represents patients' beliefs that the institution of science will eventually produce treatment for their disease, whereas the individual narrative represents patients' beliefs that they can alter their prognosis through affective and behavioral modifications. The distinct analytical categories of "biomedical" and "individual," however, fail to account for the fact that patient hope has been found to be much more complex.