Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock observed students at a teaching hospital trying to diagnose a woman's debilitating headaches. Students were impatient with the woman's description of her life circumstances, including an abusive husband and an ailing mother-in-law, but her description might BEST be termed as which of the following?
a. an illness narrative
b. a biomedical diagnosis
c. the human microbiome
d. alternative medicine