Klay Lamprell and Jeffrey Braithwaite use one of my favorite words when talking about stories: “structure”. Writing in Medical Humanities, the authors discuss two complimentary ways to help patients express their own story. The first is a structural approach, and the second is more character-driven. The purpose of the article is to bring these techniques […]
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky more or less invented what we now call Behavioral Economics. Tversky passed away in 1996, but Kahneman went on to win the Nobel Prize and his 2011 bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, brought their work to the general public. The big question Kahneman continuously answers in the book is, “How […]
What would a consultation look like if a patient were able to voice all of their concerns? Asked in a different way, how can we quantitatively demonstrate the benefits of a consultation where a patient is allowed to simply speak freely? Writing in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. M. Kim Marvel et […]
In the discussions about how to bring the humanities into medicine, one essential feature often gets lost. The attempts to make care more human and more humane aren’t being done for the sake of warm fuzzies. There are concrete ways medical outcomes suffer when healthcare practitioners and patients aren’t communicating well. Writing in The BMJ, […]
In a section of the BMJ under the header How To Do It, Ian Christopher McManus, Charles A. Vincent, S. Thom, and Jane Kidd offer practical advice from their experiences teaching communications to students at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School. I’m certainly not running a medical school, but there are still some interesting, practical ideas […]
I was initially interested in Kristin M. Langellier’s article because of the idea of performance. The main project of my work in medical storytelling has been to take the ideas bound up in Narrative Medicine and apply them to face-to-face interaction. With Narrative Medicine, my concern has always been that narrative skills are often parallel […]
For something a little different, this February, the Thursday Reviews will be dedicated to a few of Richard Asher’s classic articles from the late 1950s: February 1: “Why Are Medical Journals So Dull?” The Talking Sense trilogy: February 8: “Clinical Sense” February 15: “Making Sense” February 22: “Talking Sense” Writing in the British Medical Journal […]
