Discussing treatment options is more complex than giving information and making a recommendation. Today, shared decision making includes patient access to the electronic medical record and internet searches, however patients still turn to their clinicians as the most important and trusted source. In addition to balancing information and emotion, clinicians need to take into account how involved patients wish to be in decision making. A roadmap for discussing treatment decisions is: 1. Prepare for the visit, 2. Frame the decision to be made, 3. Ask about decision-making preferences explicitly, 4. Adapt the discussion and recommendations based on patient decision-making preferences (shared decision making, clinician-led decision making, pros/cons), 5. Check for patient understanding, 6. Establish how the patient wants to proceed with the decision-making process. Take care with how statistics are presented and consider providing decision aides. Asking patients how they want to make decisions will help ground decisions in their values.

This chapter applies the analysis of the preceding chapter to the hodos that Circe spells out in Odyssey 12, which I argue serves as a discursive template or blueprint for Parmenides in his ‘Route to Truth’. In addition to building on the notions of the rhetorical schema and types of dependence developed in Chapter 3, I extend my analysis of the discursive architecture governed by the hodos to include the krisis or exclusive, exhaustive disjunction which is a central feature of Od. 12.55–126. I also show how the hodos in Odyssey 12 has distinctive features – including the use of modally charged negation and unusually lengthy description sections followed by argumentatively rich units of text – which link it to Parmenides’ poem but differentiate it in crucial ways from other texts and phenomena, including general patterns of Homeric deliberation, polar expressions, the crossroads in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and the so-called Orphic gold tablets.

This chapter outlines the literary history of Chicago from the city’s inception to the present day. Guided by the idea of Chicago as the crossroads of modern America, the chapter argues that the city occupies a distinctive place in American literature by virtue of its particular geographic and material features. As Chicago developed from prairie outpost to modern metropolis inthe nineteenth century, it became home to a diverse range of literary voices that grappled with representing the city’s new urban realities in its literature. The introduction also outlines how especially women, African Americans, and ethnically diverse immigrants have contributed to Chicago literature, and how successive generations of writers have provided different visions of the city that are influenced by the complex cultural and historical contexts of both the city and America at large. Pointing out that the literary history of Chicago is one of reaction by individual writers to their urban environment, the introduction considers the centrality of Chicago literature for styles and movements such as realism, naturalism, and modernism, before providing a short outline of the book’s five sections.