Narrative medicine encourages doctors to engage more deeply with patients by listening to their stories The Melbourne general practitioner Mariam Tokhi knows exactly what her friend and colleague the senior paediatric emergency physician Fiona Reilly means when she speaks of her “back pocket full of ghosts”. Reilly is talking about those haunting memories all medical […]
Storytelling saved my sanity during the coronavirus pandemic. The lockdown afforded me time to write and share stories about my life and career. I wasn’t writing my memoir as much as I was engaged in the practice of narrative medicine writing — stories about the meaning of illness and opportunities to reflect on the vastness […]
Being a patient makes you the lead character in your health journey. If you have a rare or serious condition, your story might have started decades ago or maybe you’re coping with a brand-new diagnosis. Either way, you have something to say about your lived experience. That’s why we asked Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Michael Vitez […]
Narrative medicine, which encourages patients and families to share stories about their experience with illness or death, may seem like an unlikely path for someone whose career has focused mostly on German language and literature. Erika Nelson, associate professor of German Studies, came to the field from her own life experience: the loss of her late […]
Medical interest in the study of narratives, whether those of patients or doctors, goes back a long way. However, the field of narrative medicine emerged in the late 20th century and is associated in many people’s minds with two seminal texts. One was Narrative Based Medicine: Dialogue and Discourse in Clinical Practice, a collection of essays […]
Guidelines for the implementation of narrative medicine in clinical practice exist; however, in Italy, no standard methodology is currently available for the management of oncological patients. Since 2017, at the “Regina Elena” National Cancer Institute, studies using “digital narrative diaries” (DNMLAB platform) have been carried out; this article focuses on a pilot, uncontrolled, real-life study […]
A preliminary, open, uncontrolled, real-life study in the oncology and radiotherapy departments of Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico National Cancer Institute Regina Elena, Rome, (Italy), recruiting adult Italian-speaking patients who then completed the DNM diary from the start of treatment, showed that the use of the DNM in oncology patients assisted clinicians […]