Sometimes I think there are two kinds of people (that’s nonsense of course because there are as many “kinds” as there are people!). The two kinds I’d like to consider here are those who value stories, and those who value data.
I am still astonished when I remember the conversation I had with a young junior doctor who told me they were being taught “Don’t listen to the patient, they lie all the time. Only the results tell the truth” That is a data teacher talking, and, frankly, I think it’s scary to think such an attitude exists in doctors, especially doctors who are teaching young doctors. (by the way, do you remember a character called “Data“?)
What I love is the story. Every person I meet tells me a new story. It’s in the narrative that I can make sense of their suffering. It’s in the narrative that I can see the connections between the mind, the body and the spirit.
We all use narrative, not only to understand each other, but to make sense of our own lives.
When I first started to explore the use of narrative in medicine, I think the very first article I read was by Rita Charon. Here’s a passage from her book, Narrative Medicine.
What I am trying to convey is the kind of listening that will not only register facts and information but will, between the lines of listening, recognize what the teller is revealing about the self. Conventional medical care has not considered this kind of listening to be its responsibility. Except for some psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, health care professionals cannot give the time or get the training needed to listen for stories. Without knowing what is salient to an illness and what is not, many doctors and nurses fear that such listening will trap them for hours hearing information that is unrelated to disease. Listening to it, they think, will only distract them from the task at hand— to deal with the insomnia or to treat the abdominal pain. Unfortunately, sickness does not travel in straight lines, and we who care for sick people have to be equipped for circuitous journeys if we want to be of help. Although many health care professionals worry that they do not have the time to listen for stories, many of us who have incorporated listening into practice find that time invested early is recouped quickly. Indeed, the first few visits with a patient may take more time than in conventional practice, but time is saved shortly down the road by having developed a more robust clinical alliance from the start. The serious consequences of not being able to do this kind of narratively sophisticated listening is that patients’ symptoms get dismissed, their non-medical concerns get ignored, and treatable disease gets missed. More compellingly, only this kind of narrative listening will hear the connections among body, mind, and self, and disease recognition and treatment cannot proceed, we are beginning to believe, without simultaneous attention to all three.
I think that’s so right. The shame and weakness of the UK NHS is how it is constructed around routine encounters between doctors and patients which last less than ten minutes. What on earth can you understand about a patient in ten minutes? How do you make a diagnosis? No wonder doctors send patients off for X Rays, scans of this, scans of that, and blood tests so much nowadays. But what worries me most about our current model of care, is how prioritising data, results in just what Rita Charon says “patients’ symptoms get dismissed, their non-medical concerns get ignored, and treatable disease gets missed.”
Jennifer Percy, writing in The Atlantic, says
The language of science was unsatisfying to me. “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it’s comprehensible,” Einstein said. But I don’t think human relationships are ever fully comprehensible. They can clarify for small, beautiful moments, but then they change. Unlike a scientific experiment with rigorous, controlled parameters, our lives are boundless and shifting. And there’s never an end to the story. We need more than science—we need storytelling to capture that kind of complexity, that kind of incomprehensibility.
It’s not just human relationships which are never fully comprehensible, it’s human beings. Can we really apply “rigorous, controlled parameters”, to lives which are “boundless and shifting”?
We do need storytelling to capture the complexity. And we do need to understand that these stories never end.
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