Perhaps the most common venue for sharing health stories is a doctor’s office or hospital. But unless clinicians have been trained to engage skillfully with your story, much can get lost in translation.
“Healthcare professionals may be knowledgeable about disease, but they are often ignorant of the abyss at which patients routinely stand,” writes Rita Charon, MD, PhD, in her groundbreaking book Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness.
The field of narrative medicine, which Charon helped establish through her work at Columbia University, seeks to address this gap by encouraging medical students and practitioners to study literature, philosophy, and ethics. These fields can help healthcare professionals learn to become “close readers” of their patients’ stories.
By taking careful note of details, including characters, plot, themes, gestures, and silences, the clinician can better understand what’s happening medically, as well as what the patient values most. The aims of narrative medicine include making clinicians more sensitive and empathetic toward their patients as well as helping physicians become more self-aware and reflective in their own lives.
Patients can also help their care teams pay closer attention to the important details of their own stories (see “9 Strategies to Become an Empowered Patient” for more).
“I really want my doctors to see me as a whole person, not just a problem to solve,” says Taylor Coffman, a writer, performer, and patient advocate who lives with a rare disease.
Coffman recommends going to appointments with detailed notes to share. These can include your symptoms and questions plus a list of what matters to you in your life and in the care you seek. One tactic she recommends is bringing a photo showing yourself at a time when you were well and doing things you enjoy or that are important to you. (Learn how to boost your health literacy to understand medical information, ask better questions, and become an active partner with your care team at “10 Tips to Take Charge of Your Next Medical Visit.”)
“If you come in on your sickest day, your doctors don’t know what ‘well’ looks like on you,” she explains. Instead, she says, you want to tell a story that communicates, “‘This is my normal and this is my goal.’”
Healing Stories
The stories we tell about our illnesses and injuries can shape how we cope with them. Discover how narrative-based therapies can help us create stories that can heal ourselves at “Why Telling Your Health Story Can Be Healing,” from which this article was excerpted.
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