Suchergebnisse

This essay will examine some of the narrative practices emerging in the health care professions — medicine, nursing, social work, and psychotherapy. We have always, of course, understood that the most fertile and clinically salient information we derive about patients comes from listening to them talking about their illnesses. Nonetheless, medicine's recent past is marked by not so much a suspicion of as a dismissal of word in diagnosing and treating disease. Of late, medicine (and because I am a doctor, I will limit myself to thinking about medicine in the essay) has found sustenance from such fields as trauma studies, oral history, and testimony work. Finally, we are coming around to understanding that our tasks include the duty to bear witness as others tell of trauma and loss.The narrative practice of medicine — or, as I have come to say, the practice of narrative medicine — unites a host of neighboring concerns and approaches. Historically, medicine came into the narrative realms through qualitative social science, especially sociolinguistics, as a means to represent and comprehend the conversations that take place between doctors and patients. Such scholars as Elliot Mishler, Richard Frankel, Catherine Riessman, and Candice West really altered medical practice by making medical discourse amenable to inspection and then analysis. Around the same time, we also turned to literary texts and ways of thinking that help us to enter the worlds of patients, see others' experience from their perspectives, greet the metaphorical as well as the factual power of words, and be moved by what we hear. Oddly, then, medical practice became a bridge between the qualitative social sciences and literary theory, letting us, from the inside, see how very similar are the efforts of the sociologist examining discourse and the novelist creating it.We doctors feel great good fortune in having the ultimate objective correlative — what might be captivating but ethereal theorizing becomes as practical and concrete and earthy as can be by virtue of being about somebody's body — particularly somebody's ailing body. What extreme pleasure that my thinking complicated thoughts and being attuned to the complex ways of language can translate into control of my patients' blood sugar or relief of their migraines or diagnosis of their coronary artery disease. Narrative medicine becomes, in the end, a heady, brainy, compassionate, corporeal practice that can heal the patient and nourish the doctor at the same time — by virtue of the talk.

Abstract Literary narrative theory offers robust conceptual frameworks for understand-ing the act of writing, the act of reading, the configuration of plot, and the narrative contract that binds writer and reader together. This article applies some current theoretical approaches used in studying literary storytelling to the storytelling that takes place in the doctor's office, conceptualizing the patient as the writer or teller and the doctor as the reader or listener. By inspecting clinical medicine as a narrative enterprise, shot through with the ambiguities and language-borne allusiveness of the fictional text, this study demonstrates ways in which patients and doctors may better understand their complex and often unsuccessful attempts to hear one another to the end.(General Internal Medicine and Literature)

"Combining first-person narration, scholarly reflections, and advocacy, this volume features conversations with physician-scholars Rita Charon and Jonathan Metzl and provides a holistic view of the human interactions and structural forces that define healthcare today. The contributors afford us opportunities to reconsider health through a poetic and political lense, and help us envision a more socially informed and just practice of medicine"--

To examine the content of physician-elderly patient medical primary care encounters, audiotapes of 66 routine follow-up general medical visits were analyzed. Using the Multi-dimensional Interaction Analysis system, coders determined which content areas were discussed, which interactive participant initiated the discussion, and the quality of physician responsiveness in the different content areas. As hypothesized, physicians initiated discussion of the majority of subjects. Both physicians and patients were most likely to initiate discussion of medical topics. Physicians were more responsive to those topics that they initiated compared to the topics that older patients initiated. Implications of the research for physicians and elderly patients are discussed.

Intro -- Table of Contents -- Foreword, by Rita Charon -- Preface: A Carnival of Possibilities, by Ann Burack-Weiss -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Many Ways of Knowing, by Ann Burack-Weiss -- Part I. Writing as Discovery and Healing -- 1. Stuck: An Intersection of Stories, by Lynne Bamat Mijangos -- 2. Garden at Vaucresson: It's Not All a Bed of Roses, by Lynn Sara Lawrence -- 3. Another Kind of Witnessing: Narrative Medicine and the Trauma Therapist, by Kristen Slesar -- Part II. Narrative Social Work with Individuals and Families -- 4. The Reluctant Storyteller: The Use of Self in Narrative Social Work, by Millet Israeli -- 5. Grace Notes: Singing in Marion's Hospital Room, by Constance H. Gemson -- 6. One Family's Experience of Falling Out of Health: A Mother Remembers -- a Daughter Reflects, by Jessica Greenbaum and Isabel Marcus -- 7. Scheherazade: The Social Worker as Interpreter of Social, Cultural, and Familial Maladies, by Judith Levi -- 8. Sharing a Narrative Meal: The Therapeutic Use of Narrative with Older Adults, by Lauren Taylor -- Part III. Narrative Social Work with Groups -- 9. Storytelling and Listening to Combat HIV/AIDS: Stigma and Secrecy in Kenya, by Benaifer Bhadha -- 10. I Like Dancing and Singing and Prancing and Flinging: Using Poetry in Dementia Care, by Mary Hume -- 11. Jesse's Story: A Mother's Voice—a Social Work Journey, by Heidi Mandel -- 12. With Every Story We Rise: Narrative Means to Social Justice Ends, by Nora McCarthy and Rachel Blustain -- Part IV. Narrative Social Work in Education, Supervision, and Research -- 13. Transnational Parenting: The Hidden Costs of the Search for a "Better Life", by Christiana Best-Giacomini -- 14. The Worker–Mentor Story: Narrative Approaches in Social Work Supervision, by Alicia Fry