Narrative Medicine connotes a medicine practiced with narrative competence and marked with an understanding of the highly complex narrative situations among doctors, patients, colleagues, and the public

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Murad Idris                                                                                    Assignment: Advice Narrative Medicine

Student number: 2092557                                                          Email: [email protected]

Date: 22-04-2012                                                                          Lecturer: Ad Kaptein

Advice Narrative Medicine

‘’Narrative medicine a way forward’’

Narrative Medicine connotes a medicine practiced with narrative competence and marked with an understanding of the highly complex narrative situations among doctors, patients, colleagues, and the public

For years now, the fields of narrative medicine and literature and medicine have reminded doctors that illness unfolds in stories that clinical practice transpires in the intimacy between teller and listener and that physicians are as much witnesses to patients' suffering as they are fixers of their broken parts. More and more clinicians and trainees are being encouraged to write about their clinical practices so as to develop the capacity for reflection. New clinical routines that provide patients with copies of what their doctors write about them or that encourage patients to contribute directly to their medical records are challenging traditional notions of authorship of the clinical record and, indeed, of the illness.

‘’Stories stories’’ Ad Kaptein

People are storytellers. Patients talk about their illness, their ill-ness, about themselves. Even doctors tell stories about the patients to colleagues with whom they deal, for sick colleagues, and about their own diseases. Literary authors write about these stories and also poets, composers, filmmakers and painters depict disease and illness. How are illness and care depicted in various art forms? That is the narrative in medicine. Novels, poems, music (opera, pop music), paintings and films are fascinating sources for studying the story of the patient. Medical students to be better doctors if they indulge in novels about being ill? Are doctors a better look at real patients at the Department of Dermatology when they learned what they have to the skin of a naked woman on a Rembrandt painting to see? Narrative medicine is not only useful for training in medicine but will also benefit the patient. A Talk with several examples from belles-lettres and the arts and an active role for the public.

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Narrative Medicine fortifies clinical practice with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness. Through narrative training, the Program in Narrative Medicine helps doctors, nurses, social workers, and therapists to improve the effectiveness of care by developing the capacity for attention, reflection, representation, and affiliation with patients and colleagues. Our research and outreach missions are conceptualizing, evaluating, and spear-heading these ideas and practices nationally and internationally.

Relevance of narrative medicine

The operative practice of medicine must have narrative competence structured within it, that is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act ...

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