This document discusses the importance of storytelling and narrative in medicine. It argues that stories help patients and doctors understand illness experiences and shape identities. When patient and physician narratives of an illness conflict, it can hinder treatment. The document advocates for narrative medicine, which involves listening to patients' stories to gain a deeper understanding of their humanity and what they are going through. Narrative medicine represents a "storied understanding of health" and can help doctors better empathize and care for their patients.

1. Marie Ennis-O’Connor
DotMED The Creative Medicine Conference #DotMED14

2. @JBBC

3. “Everything we see hides another thing”

4. How can we open ourselves up to seeing more?

5. Story

6. “We use them to derive meaning
from experience and to pass along knowledge, values, and wisdom.”
@LouiseAronson

7. Stories are how we shape our world The way we understand our lives and identities

8. “Story was crucial to our evolution— more so than opposable thumbs.
Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to.”
Lisa Cron

9. “Stories seem to contain that timeless thread of human connection. This is what our brains were wired for reaching out and interacting with others.”

10. PNAS.org: Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication by Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert and Uri Hasson

11. Your Brain On Story

12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1a7tiA1Qzo

13. Empathy is an essential step towards compassion

15. Can story be the bridge to build empathy and compassion in medicine?

16. Story

17. “Story becomes the ground that patients and healthcare professionals travel together.”
@JBaruchMD

18. What happens when the patient narrative doesn’t match the physician’s version?

19. Conflicting illness stories will hinder treatment because the meaning we give to our illness is significant in terms of compliance, managing our illness, and contributing to our well-being.

20. “Seriously ill people are wounded not just in body but in voice.”
Illness Is A Call For Stories
narrative wreckage

22. A patient isn’t a disease with a body attached but a life into which a disease has intruded.

24. “When doctors can see illness from their patients' eyes they become better doctors.”
Ronald Drusin, MD, vice dean for education at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons

25. To understand a narrative of illness is to understand what it means to be human.

27. Sayantani DasGupta
@sayantani16
“Long before doctors had anything of interest in their black bags – no MRIs, no lab tests, no all body CAT scans – what they had was the ability to show up, what they had was the ability to listen, and bear witness to someone’s life, death, illness, suffering, and everything else that comes in between.”

29. “The simple yet complex art of listening is, in and of itself, a clinical intervention.
Listening constitutes the very heart and soul of the clinical encounter..””
“Please Hear What I'm Not Saying: The Art of Listening in the Clinical Encounter” Mary T Shannon. Perm J. 2011 Spring; 15(2): e114–e117.

30. Medicine is inherently stamped with narrative.

31. Patients and doctors tell two different stories

32. http
Health care is supposed to build on the story with each contact, but if we don’t know the story, each contact becomes a closed episode of its own, disconnected from every other episode. Fragmentation results as the outcome of a nonstoried approach to health care.
Narrative Medicine: Relationships, Stories, and Healing
Lewis Mehl-Madrona MD

33. “The ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others.”
Rita Charon
Narrative Medicine

34. Charon R. Narrative medicine. New
“A medicine practiced without a genuine awareness of what patients go through may fulfil its technical goals but it is an empty medicine, or at best, half a medicine.”
Charon R. Narrative medicine. New York: Oxford University Press; 2006

35. Narrative medicine represents a storied understanding of health. It’s a return to listening to the patient’s story.

36. Saving and prolonging life incur an obligation to accompany patients on their illness journeys. Thomas R. Egnew. Suffering, Meaning, and Healing: Challenges of Contemporary Medicine. Annals of Family Medicine. 2009.

37. "The doctor is the patient’s only familiar in a foreign country"

38. “I want my patients' passions listed on their charts. Because if that's not there, then the only thing I read is ‘endometrial cancer,’ carpal-tunnel syndrome, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and mother died when she was 40 of breast cancer. I don't want to look at this person and simply think, she's doomed. I want to know what her passion is in life. Who is this person sitting in front of me?”
Pamela Wible @pamelawiblemd

39. “Not every patient can be saved, but his illness may be eased by the way the doctor responds to him—and in responding to him the doctor may save himself….” Anatole Broyard