Quotes

This post is a quotation from this web site:

"Narrative competence is required to practice primary care medicine effectively. That is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others. Medicine practiced with narrative competence (narrative medicine) is proposed as a model for humane and effective practice.

There are 4 central narrative situations: Physician and patient; Physician and self; Physician and colleagues; Physicians and society.

With narrative competence, physicians can reach and join their patients through illness, recognize their own personal journeys through medicine, acknowledge kinship with and duties toward other health care professionals, and inaugurate consequential discourse with the public about health care.

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.

Despite dazzling technological progress in diagnosis and treatment, physicians sometimes lack the capacity to recognize the plights of their patients, to extend empathy towards those who suffer, and to join honestly and courageously with patients in their illnesses. A scientific competent medicine alone cannot help a patient grapple with the loss of health or find meaning in suffering. Along with scientific ability, physicians need the ability to listen to the narratives of the patient, grasp and honor their meaning, and be moved to act on the patient's behalf. Narrative competence is the competence that human beings use to absorb, interpret, and respond to stories.

Comment by site author: I believe primary care clinicians would understand the term better if it were changed from "narrative medicine" to narrative-based medicine". "Evidence-based" medicine is the scientific basis of medicine. "Narrative-based" medicine is the art."