¶ … Illness | STORIES OF ILLNESS |

"Honoring the Stories of Illness"

The "narrative medicine" approach has been garnering increasing popularity of late, in healthcare facilities and medical research centers. Columbia University's literary scholar and doctor, Rita Charon, came up with the concept in the course of the last ten years, along with her coworkers. The scholar has designed "Parallel Charts" and similar tools that caregivers can utilize for writing personally about patient-physician dynamics, reading textual narratives, and consequently paying better attention to what their patients have to say and thereby improving care delivery (Ensign, 2014).

Analysis and Interpretation

Charon's definition of narrative medicine is as follows: Narrative medicine is an approach practiced using the skills of acknowledging, learning, understanding, and being touched by the tales of the ill. She believes this to be a novel clinical frame which is capable of improving the numerous deficits and failings in the current healthcare delivery processes. Healthcare providers equipped with "narrative competence" can bridge the "gap" of their relationship with mortality, disease contexts, beliefs with regard to illness causality, and blame, shame, fear and other emotions. Current discourse on this approach to therapy assumes ideal interaction between a cognitively sound, amenable adult patient and an empathetic caregiver (Carter, 2006).

According to Carter (2006), Charon discovered the presence of five shared narrative features between literature and practical clinical care. She asserts that carefully reading narratives will help physicians develop skills...

Beyond this theory, strong and compelling examples can be found of patient-physician interactions, several of which are from Charon's personal experience. One example is of a sick child's mother, who herself falls ill due to stress. She starts healing upon seeing a narrative link.
Charon listens attentively to patients' stories during clinic visits and subsequently jots down whatever she remembers, whilst simultaneously trying to stick to the order they narrated their tale in. Charon knows doctors will object to this approach, stating they have no time for it. But she claims it doesn't matter whether facts are recorded as patients state them or later on. The time taken for both approaches is the same. She believes her note-taking is now much more informative than it was earlier. More importantly, the strategy displays ripple effects: a narratively retrained person finds three complete dimensions when examining a patient. Lastly, writing about a few patients helps her pay much more attention to all her patients (Malina, 2006).

The clinician perceives broader applications. With improved caregiver understanding of the aspects of attention, affiliation, and representation, they can behave more ethically, be more community-oriented and heal their clients better. A different approach will be adopted in conducting patient interviews: rather than following a set pattern of questions, open-ended questions will be posed to patients. Important aspects…