Clinical Experiences and Narrative

¶ … 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 which improve patient care, including ethicality and patient-physician inter-subjectivity. 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 will emerge in a way that proves most advantageous to patients. This approach will indeed be more time-consuming, but will exhibit greater long-term efficiency (Carter, 2006). Furthermore, Charon stresses, in the TEDEX video, how the skill of relating a great tale and sound listening skills are capable of revolutionizing the way physicians and patients communicate.

The author contends that philosophical dogmas and legal approaches limit bioethics. In her view, narrative bioethics provides greater human values with regard to the way individuals feel, relate to one another, and experience reality. Charon claims medicine's chief purpose is assisting humanity with immediate issues; moreover, it permits lifelong interaction (TED x, 2011). "Honoring the Stories of Illness" by Dr. Rita Charon has a rather captivating cover image.

Such artwork resembles Pablo Picasso's, wherein the artist depicted individuals in certain shapes and figures (for instance, with triangular or rectangular bodies and facial features). The two individuals featured on Rita Charon's book cover appear to be deep in contemplation. In Malina's (2006) view, the book cover might actually foreshadow the topic under study, and be an emphasis on the clinician's similarly new way of perceiving her patients.

Rather than approaching all individual patients using an identical plan and obtaining requisite facts in order to fill up the blanks, the narrative medicine approach would have physicians taking lead from whatever facts patients wish to convey to them and how they wish to convey them. Conclusion According to Malina (2006), when relatives, peers or friends hear the medical tales of others, they often only have to contact a doctor or show sympathy and compassion.

In contrast, the physician-listener has to obtain clinically significant information from those tales and employ them in therapeutic and diagnostic decision-making. However, Charon is of the opinion that this only implies that, just like writers or literary critics, a doctor must be an expert at reading others' stories, and attuned to individual tales' structure and depths of meaning. If physician engagement with their patients takes place the way a well-trained.