Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: Why Doctors Should Read Fiction

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Sam Kean’s article in The Atlantic, “Why Doctors Should Read Fiction,” highlights what many medical schools, residencies and medical groups are realizing: medical providers and patients alike benefit from physicians taking an interest in literature. Kean asks, “if studying medicine is good training for literature, could studying literature also be good training for medicine?”

Kean’s article outlines a study in Literature and Medicine, “Showing That Medical Ethics Cases Can Miss the Point.” The study found that “certain literary exercises…can expand doctors’ worldviews and make them more attuned to the dilemmas real patients face.”

Students rewrite and dissect short stories that expose an ethical case study, such as physician-writer Richard Seltzer’s “Fetishes.” The study’s author, Woods Nash, argues that “short stories are far more effective means of teaching students and health-care professionals to wrestle with the mess, to pay attention to narrative perspective and detail, and to become more comfortable with ambiguity.”

Writing Prompt: Have you read a piece of fiction that outlined a certain bioethical dilemma? Do you agree with Kean’s assertion that doctors should read fiction? How might the practice prove beneficial to a medical provider? Read Seltzer’s “Fetishes” and rewrite the story in short form, as a poem or case study. What new insight do you gain from this exercise? Write for 10 minutes.

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Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: Going Solo

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Nurse and writer Amanda Anderson describes the final moments of caring for a patient in the ICU in “Going Solo“.

Anderson opens the piece noting that she decides to scrub the patient’s teeth clean. Why do you think she’s determined to complete this simple act?

The author comments that this passing feels different than others because she doesn’t also have the patient’s family to nurse through the process. Her actions are per protocol, “governed only by a set of instructions:
1.  Administer pain dose once, prior to extubation.
2.  Extubate patient.
3.  Administer pain dose every three minutes for respiratory rate greater than twenty,
or obvious signs of pain, as needed.
4.  Notify house staff at time of asystole.”

How do you feel when you read through the protocol that Anderson follows? How do you think she feels and how does she convey that through her writing?

I appreciate Anderson’s candidness in immersing us in her thought process. She plays jazz for him, then realizes, what if he hates jazz? As medical providers, we only get a snippet of a patient’s life. If you’re a medical provider, have you ever wondered about a specific patient’s life outside of the hospital? How could that information inform their care? As a patient, what do you wish your medical providers knew about who you are?

Writing prompt: As a medical provider, think about a protocol you follow, a procedure or list of instructions you adhere to in a certain situation to provide care. List the steps. Now consider an unwritten protocol, such as a nurse in caring for family members throughout their loved one’s death in an ICU. List the steps. How do they compare? Alternatively, think about an encounter you’ve had in the medical world: a ten minute doctor’s office visit, visiting a friend who is hospitalized, getting or giving an immunization. Imagine the broader life of the person who was giving or getting that medical care. Consider their life narrative. Write for 10 minutes.

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Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: The Heroism of Incremental Care

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As a primary care physician myself, I found Atul Gawande’s new article “The Heroism of Incremental Care” encouraging and empowering. The New Yorker piece highlights the importance of longitudinal care between a patient and their primary care provider.

When Gawande visits a headache clinic in Massachusetts, the physician there tells him she starts by listening to the patient: “You ask them to tell the story of their headache and then you stay very quiet for a long time.” What have you found is the most important component of a physician-patient encounter? If you are a provider, do you feel you’re always able to listen to the patient’s full story? If you’re a patient, do you feel listened to when you see your doctor?

When Gawande visits the primary care clinic in Boston, he’s told the reason primary care is important to bettering patient health is due to the “relationship”. Do you agree? Have you had a relationship with a primary care provider that has invariably improved your health over the years? If you are a primary care provider, has this been your experience with patients?

Writing Prompt: Gawande writes of the clinic he visits: “At any given moment, someone there might be suturing a laceration, lancing an abscess, aspirating a gouty joint, biopsying a suspicious skin lesion, managing a bipolar-disorder crisis, assessing a geriatric patient who had taken a fall, placing an intrauterine contraceptive device, or stabilizing a patient who’d had an asthma attack.” Think about the last time you saw your primary care provider. Write about that visit in the present tense, then project a decade or two into the future. Imagine how that visit, and many others like it, might have made a difference to your health decades from now. Write for 10 minutes.

 

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