Healing Stories

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Narrative Medicine is an innovation in patient care which introduces healthcare professionals to the power of stories.

Our narratives can be invaluable tools in helping professionals to treat their patients more effectively.

Equally, though, stories can also be used by doctors and nurses and social workers – anyone who works with human pain – to integrate and deal with the traumatic realities of their professions.

Rita Charon, Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at the Columbia University says,

Most patients and healthcare professionals have yet to learn that one aspect of healing is exactly this, listening to the telling of the self. The body, it turns out, is the portal to the self, and caring for the ill body can open the door to a moving and healing intimacy with the self. As one diagnoses and manages the asthma, the cancer, the dementia, the alcoholism, one recognizes and enters into relation with the full self of the patient — the hopes, the dread, the strengths, the dreams. As one accompanies the patient’s self along with the body through improvement or decline, one almost magically recognizes and accompanies one’s own self, for the self that is summoned by the call of the patient is the authentic self.

So, if doctors are using stories to better understand their patients and themselves, how might we do the same to help us understand the world and ourselves? _______________________________________________

Medscape, – Narrative Medicine Creates Alliance with Patients, Rita Charon, MD, PhD – 01/19/2006

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10 Comments

    1. As far as I can understand the practice of Narrative Medicine – they teach qualified health care professionals (doctors, nurses and social workers) how to follow the narrative in their patients’ stories both to learn more about the physical illness and also to be able to better ‘accompany’ their patients through their illness and treatment. In parallel they teach the professionals to compose their own narratives (actual written narratives I think) to better equip them to deal with the trauma they face in dealing with pain and suffering – and often being powerless to relieve either.

      Does that make sense?

    2. Not really.

      I get the “treat the whole patient” part ~ ask them WHY they overeat . . . don’t just tell them to lose weight. Ask them WHY they smoke . . . don’t just tell them to quit.

      But I don’t see any reasonable analogy to understanding the world and its story through the millenia.

      1. Some illness is a result of self-abuse but lots of illness – and accidents – aren’t. I knew a lovely man – a doctor – who never drank, never smoked, dedicated his life to caring for others and developed lung cancer and died in his 60s – when I was 12 and my father was 39 he had a car accident and broke his neck leaving him paraplegic – (he’s still alive and almost 80 remarkably!) – but as I understand the Narrative Medicine approach – doctors and patients are engaged in a parallel process and both have stories – the patient wakes up one morning and finds a lump in her breast and her ‘narrative’ – the thread of story that shapes her world – changes abruptly. The doctor who treats her may not be able to save her life and so there is guilt and trauma and all sorts of narrative altering in that too for the doctor.
        I think in the non-medical world, we all struggle with understanding ourselves – making sense of our own narratives.

        Dan Siegel for example says that if parents can make sense of their own childhoods – no matter how traumatic – they and their children will be absolutely fine. He even uses the word narrative in this context.

        We are all in relationships with others and so it can be useful to be able to really learn to follow the thread of the story that others are telling if we want to understand them.

        Anyway – that’s what I’ve been thinking about vis a vis this idea of narrative – sorry about the long answer, Nancy but thanks for the question!

    1. As far as I can understand the practice of Narrative Medicine – they teach qualified health care professionals (doctors, nurses and social workers) how to follow the narrative in their patients’ stories both to learn more about the physical illness and also to be able to better ‘accompany’ their patients through their illness and treatment. In parallel they teach the professionals to compose their own narratives (actual written narratives I think) to better equip them to deal with the trauma they face in dealing with pain and suffering – and often being powerless to relieve either.

      Does that make sense?

  4. I really enjoyed reading that – thanks! I agree that a mindful, day-by-day approach is best and to me that’s a story too – it’s not all about the past – in fact even in the narrative medicine example – it’s much more about now. Thanks again.

  5. I really enjoyed reading that – thanks! I agree that a mindful, day-by-day approach is best and to me that’s a story too – it’s not all about the past – in fact even in the narrative medicine example – it’s much more about now. Thanks again.

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