Personal illness narratives: using reflective writing to teach empathy.
Sayantani DasGupta,Rita Charon +1 more
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TLDR
The “personal illness narrative” exercise created a medium for students to elicit, interpret, and translate their personal illness experiences while witnessing their colleagues’ stories and was well received and highly recommended for other students and residents.Abstract:
Reflective writing is one established method for teaching medical students empathetic interactions with patients. Most such exercises rely on students' reflecting upon clinical experiences. To effectively elicit, interpret, and translate the patient's story, however, a reflective practitioner must also be self-aware, personally and professionally. Race, gender, and other embodied sources of identity of practitioners and patients have been shown to influence the nature of clinical communication. Yet, although medical practice is dedicated to examining, diagnosing, and treating bodies, the relationship of physicians to their own physicality is vexed. Medical training creates a dichotomy whereby patients are identified by their bodies while physicians' bodies are secondary to physicians' minds. As a result, little opportunity is afforded to physicians to deal with personal illness experiences, be they their own or those of loved ones. This article describes a reflective writing exercise conducted in a second-year medical student humanities seminar. The "personal illness narrative" exercise created a medium for students to elicit, interpret, and translate their personal illness experiences while witnessing their colleagues' stories. Qualitative analysis of students' evaluation comments indicated that the exercise, although emotionally challenging, was well received and highly recommended for other students and residents. The reflective writing exercise may be incorporated into medical curricula aimed at increasing trainees' empathy. Affording students and residents an opportunity to describe and share their illness experiences may counteract the traditional distancing of physicians' minds from their bodies and lead to more empathic and self-aware practice.read more
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References
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TL;DR: By bridging the divides that separate physicians from patients, themselves, colleagues, and society, narrative medicine offers fresh opportunities for respectful, empathic, and nourishing medical care.
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Sue Atkins,Kathy Murphy +1 more
TL;DR: It is suggested that reflection is an important learning tool in professional education and that the skills required for reflection need to be developed in professional courses.
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Calibrating the Physician: Personal Awareness and Effective Patient Care
Dennis H. Novack,Anthony L. Suchman,William F. Clark,Ronald M. Epstein,Eva Najberg,Craig Kaplan +5 more
TL;DR: A "curriculum" of 4 core topics for reflection and discussion of physicians' beliefs and attitudes, physicians' feelings and emotional responses in patient care, challenging clinical situations, and physician self-care is proposed.