One of the main themes of this blog, and probably a core theme of my daily work as a holistic, integrative doctor, is the place of narrative in our lives. I recently mentioned in another post that working with patients’ narratives was a part of what I and my colleagues do every day at the [...]
Archive for the ‘narrative’ Category
Healing narratives
Posted in from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, life, narrative on October 21, 2011 | 9 Comments »
The importance of stories – fictional stories
Posted in books, creativity, education, from the living room, from the reading room, life, narrative, psychology, writing on September 11, 2011 | 1 Comment »
I’m a great fan of stories. In fact, I think we understand ourselves and others by using narrative, and the central way in which I work as a doctor is to hear people’s stories, and help them to change them from stories of being stuck or in chaos, to stories of flow, and flourishing and [...]
Wiping your memories
Posted in from the reading room, health, narrative, psychology on August 23, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
One of my favourite lines from Bob Seeger is “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then”. However, I was a little startled by a piece in the “i” newspaper last week about drugs which can wipe out memory. Here’s a jpeg of the bit of the article which really took me [...]
Dimensions of meaning
Posted in from the consulting room, health, narrative on June 16, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
In a consultation recently, the question of what makes an experience or a relationship meaningful came up. Whether or not something feels meaningful is something we seem to know intuitively. We don’t usually sit down, consider the details, weigh them up, then reach a calculated conclusion. But what makes an experience or a relationship a [...]
The Renewal of Generosity
Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, narrative, philosophy on April 25, 2010 | 2 Comments »
I recently stumbled over Arthur Frank’s “The Renewal of Generosity” (ISBN 978-0226260174). Many years ago I read and was hugely impressed by his “The Wounded Storyteller”. It’s a great small book which is an important contribution to the struggle to create a better way of practising medicine in the 21st century. Doctors and patients are [...]
The Wounded Storyteller
Posted in from the consulting room, health, narrative, Uncategorized on April 25, 2010 | 3 Comments »
In “The Wounded Storyteller” (ISBN 0-226-25993-5) Arthur Frank describes his study of how patients talk about their illnesses, where he identified three major “genre” of narrative which we use to talk about illness – the “restitution story”, the “chaos story” and the “quest story”. I thought that was such an interesting insight and such a [...]
Exercises in making sense
Posted in creativity, from the living room, life, narrative, perception on October 14, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Human beings are sense-making creatures. We continuously process all the information we can gather from our environments – internal and external – and try to put the information together somehow. I think we use two particular sets of skills to do this, and they’re related. The first skill is pattern spotting. What do we think [...]
Strange things happen…..
Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, narrative, tagged coincidence, serendipity on September 1, 2009 | 1 Comment »
The other day Ian sent me an email with a link in it (he does this quite a lot!). It was to a book which he thought would interest me. I followed the link and, yes, it sounded really up my street. The book was called “Friends in Low Places”, by James Willis and it [...]
Suffering and good lives
Posted in from the consulting room, health, narrative, personal growth, philosophy, science on March 2, 2009 | 5 Comments »
My daily working life is that of a doctor. That only tells you a little because Medicine is a very broad subject and doctoring can require extremely different sets of skills. Sometimes I muse about just what is the job of a doctor? Or what makes for a good doctor? I’m pretty sure it involves [...]
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