As we read in Arthur Frank’s book, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, telling stories for the ill is a way to rewrite the map of their lives. It is also a way to create a new version of the self. Yet illness stories can be uncomfortable and prone to interruption because of our society’s discomfort with the sick. Frank writes that most “North Americans share a cultural reluctance to say that their lives have gone badly in some significant respect…” (63). Healthcare practitioners also might interrupt an illness story because the story may not seem to connect to the diagnosis, it may be “confusing or inconsistent,” it may take too much time, or it may make the healthcare practitioner uncomfortable in some way (Frank 58).
Why do you think it is it important for the patient to be able to tell their story and how can we help healthcare practitioners listen without interruption? Please leave a comment below.
It is important for the patient to have their story heard because there is a reason they are willing to tell it. They need someone to listen, whether it is a healthcare physician or a friend. However, practitioners should listen to their patients and allow them to talk about themselves. This could possibly be a chance for people in healthcare to catch on to things about their patient’s illness that they did not grab onto before. Also, patients may want to just be heard in general. Sometimes people deal with situations much more easily when they can tell someone how they feel about their experience, rather than keeping their thoughts to themselves.
I believe that it is important for a patient to be able to tell their story because their story becomes a part of them and their life. If they aren’t able to tell their health care provider their story, then they may never be able to tell it to anyone. I think that when a person goes through something in their life, whether its a tragic medical situation or a great memory, telling it to someone else helps give them closure on their emotions and feelings towards that moment and allows them to share it with someone else who they want to be able to experience it in their imagination. Doctors are trained first to diagnose, treat and fix the patient, then if they have time, comfort. Often, the result is the incapability to see who and what people are outside the “patient” they see in the hospital. If medical professionals allow their patients to talk about things they feel they need to discuss, doctors may start to learn a little bit more about these people than just their medical records. If someone feels comfortable enough to tell their story from start to finish including the details they feel are important, the doctors get closure on questions they might have missed on asking and the patient gets closure on their emotions about unsaid things about their story.
I believe that it is important for a patient to be able to tell their full story to their health care provider because if the details didn’t connect to the diagnosis in some meaningful way, they wouldn’t have shared it. While interviewing my brother for the second essay, I found that there was many times he was going off the questions I was asking him. At the beginning of the interview, I would interrupt and ask questions to pertain back to his medical issue. Towards the end of the interview, I realized that every detail he shared with me meant something to him in some way and added to the story. The only way that we would be able to help healthcare practitioners listen without interruption would be to give them more time with the patient. Doctors are so busy in a day that when they are sitting with a patient, their main goal is to get to the root of the problem and not get the “touchy feely” side of the story. Each detail a patient shares about their story is important. The patient wouldn’t tell their doctor if it wasn’t.
I think it’s important for the patient to tell their story, from a healthcare point of view, because it can give you clues about other things that could be contributing to the patient’s illness/injury. It’s also important for the patient, because telling the story can help a patient cope with the illness/injury, and it can also help them understand what’s happening to them. I think healthcare providers need to be more attentive and present with their patients, and they need to spend more time listening to their patients, and less time interrupting and asking questions. They should use the patient’s narrative to fill out whatever paperwork they need to, and then come back to the patient with any other questions after the patient is finished. I also think that healthcare providers need more time to spend with the patient, so they don’t feel rushed, because that’s when details get missed, and miscommunications happen, and mistakes get made. It also causes patients to feel mistrust towards their healthcare providers.
I think it is important for patients to tell their stories because it helps them figure out what is going on. They are able to think about what has happened to them and how they feel about it. This can bring clarity to the event. With this clarity, the patient can begin to heal. When a person becomes ill, they may be confused, upset, or in denial. Talking about what has happened to you can be therapeutic by getting all of the thoughts and emotions out. This is a healthy way of coping with trauma and illness. When patients tell their stories, they are telling the parts of the story that they think are important. This in itself can unearth information that a doctor may never be looking for. It’s important for doctors to listen to these stories for this very reason. Doctors are thinking in one mind set. They have their specific set of questions that they want the answers to and disregard other information. If doctors learn to listen to the stories of patients they they may learn very important information regarding the patients illness that they would not have known otherwise. Although it may not be the information they want, emotional health is closely linked with physical health so listening the feelings of patients can help doctors understand what is going on. Healthcare providers can listen without interruption by just being present. They should not worry about asking their questions and just go in with a clear mind. They should try to minimize notes or technology so they can truly take in all the information. They should not worry about the specific set of questions they usually ask and instead listen to all the information they can learn from the patients story.
In healthcare it is important for practitioners to allow the patients to tell their stories, because that way the patient is free to express every detail and emotion that can help lead to a clearer diagnosis. I think like we discussed previously this semester, it is easier to listen to patients using the narrative approach when seeing patients, because you can connect to the patients by listening closely and that might help to get more out of a patient because they feel more comfortable around their practitioner. By listening closely and not asking question after question the patient will not be interrupted. Asking questions after the patient is done talking can also keep the patient from being interrupted.
A traumatic incident or even an illness not only defeats the patient physically, but has a serious toll on the patient emotionally. In health care, I believe that healing in modern medicine mainly focuses on the physical trauma to the patient, brushing off the emotional toll of the patient. Since patients do suffer emotionally, they should be able to tell their story as a part of healing mentally. Broken memories from the trauma or illness can stay scattered in the patient’s brain from the incident or illness. The patient may ignore that period of life in which the illness had happened, or look back at the broken memory in sadness or grief. They may not have understood what or why that thing has happened to them, leaving them unrecovered. For the sense of optimal recovery, I do believe that it is important that the patient puts together his/her memory in word as a story. The patient may learn, by recalling and putting the memory into words, that there was a reason something happened to them, or the experience may have made better sense as to why it happened. As Arthur Frank says, this process doesn’t have to be time consuming. All the doctor needs is 3-5 minutes to ask “what are the important things that you want me to know about you”, and allow them this time to say what they feel they need to say.
There is an obvious need to have a patient to tell their story. A young child may be having stomach pains not due to illness, but due to her parents fighting so much. Without knowing a background of this story, physician may conclude that it was the flu. But this would be a false diagnosis, which healthcare can not afford to have many of financial and reputation wise. I believe that if we were to give physicians more time with their patients, than there may be no interruptions due to the physician feeling there is time restraints. Another option would be to have a patient write down in a journal before they come into the physicians. This could be given to the physician during the exam and would give a great background to the problem.
Patient’s need to tell their stories to help themselves heal. By opening up and telling a story or illness, trauma, etc. they are making themselves incredibly vulnerable. That vulnerability must at the very least be matched by their listening healthcare practitioner. If people do not feel that they are being listened to or that their story is not worth telling, they will stop opening up and may never truly be able to understand their own trauma. If this happens, and the patient feels sufficiently alienated and unimportant, they may never be able to fully move on, or heal. That is why is it equally imperative for health care workers to learn how to listen and not just hear the patient. Hearing is physical and biological, it results from the moving air vibrating our inner ear, hearing is easy, we were born to do this. Listening, and absorbing are much more difficult. This requires people to pause, self reflect, and connect to these story tellers. It requires the listener to also open up and become vulnerable. I think a major hurdle for healthcare workers to surpass to be better listeners is getting over their own egos. Dealing with death and dying everyday, and becoming insensitive to it because you’ve “seen it all” can jade people are create power dynamics that need not to exist. Be humbled by death and dying whenever you see it, because while it is a natural process of life and it happens all of the time, it is still horrible and hard to go through.
We can start by taking a page out of Rita Charon’s book. “Tell me what you think I should know about your situation.” This one sentence allows a conversation, not a probing interview style interaction. Why should we let patient’s tell their stories? Well, for starters, a patient knows a hell of a lot more about their body and situation than we as clinicians do, so who’s to say that what they are telling us has nothing to do with what’s been going on besides the patient? An uninterrupted story allows a diagnosis to connect with the individual, not the other way around. I think that we are afraid to hear the entire story because stories mean conversation, and conversation can be hard to clinicians to respond to and initiate, but we have seen throughout this course that story-telling lets the patient feel like a person and not a nine digit number on our computer screen. These conversations distinguish one patient from the next, and story telling may even make a clinicians day better. We, as a society, need to shift our focus on allowing patients to be an integral part in their diagnosis and physician visits instead of using our so called “authority” to act like we know best.