Narrative medicine is a new approach to optimizing communication between
physician and patient. It also provides a means to train physicians
in the healing arts and is, therefore, an approach that attempts to
reverse historical trends in medical education and practice. Since the
late 19th century medical education, and practice, the basic trend has
been a shift from developing empathetic practitioners to fostering unemotional
scientists. While patients may receive the best clinical care, they
may not have a healing relationship with a physician. Eventually, lack
of empathetic communication can even decrease the efficacy of clinical
care. By training physicians to understand narrative structure and to
see case histories as narratives, narrative medicine increases the physician’s
ability to communicate with patients and to maximize the information
acquired in an interview. Narrative medicine also encourages physicians
to read literature and increase their understanding of the human condition,
emphasizing the use of reflective writing as a means to develop empathy,
aid memory and to help physicians solve ethical dilemmas. Writing, and
reading thus encourages the development of reflective practitioners,
physicians who develop effective and empathetic patient-physician relationships.
There is considerable overlap between this approach to medicine and
the approach that Dr. Thomas Maren developed and advocated in his literature
courses and worked to institutionalize in his plans for the Maren Reading
Room in the University of Florida’s College of Medicine. The Maren
Room thus provides a physical location for students to reflect and read,
as well as a center for developing a narrative medicine program at the
University of Florida. The creation of such a program will take place
through a series of stages. In the short term, discussion groups, film
series, writing groups and volunteer programs can encourage students
to use the room. Speaker series, such as the one outlined below, will
help to further the long term goal of introducing a narrative medicine
program into the medical school curriculum. Speakers in this series
will outline the form of narrative medicine, medical humanities and
reflective practice, and explain how they were able to develop such
programs and work them into the curriculum of their home institution.
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