Patient-centered medicine is important for patients and physicians alike. Patients help steer the treatment and care they receive. Physicians are relieved from the burden of having to be godlike guardians of life and death. Both are able to dialogue about what the best course of action might be for this particular patient. Yet in spite […]
The first purpose of clinical medicine, Dr. William J. Donnelly quotes, is to relieve human suffering.1 Why, then, does the education and practice of mainstream medicine say almost nothing about patient suffering, other than pain relief?
One of the most important concepts of my training in storytelling is one of the most overlooked. The technical term is “The Space Between”. The idea is that one force alone is uninteresting, if not meaningless. It has to act with or against something else to be interesting and meaningful. This is a way of […]
I enjoy work like Thomas R. Egnew’s article, published in The Annals of Family Medicine. Egnew asks a simple but profound question, and the answers open up new avenues for understanding the role storytelling plays in a medical relationship. If healing is a part of medicine, why is there no operational definition of healing, nor […]
It’s been several years since my own near-fatal health scare. In the time between now and then, I’ve often reflected on how, no matter how I felt about the physicians in charge, I always implicitly trusted the nurses. I had doctors who must have hidden their halo somewhere, and I had doctors whose degree I […]
