Narrative medicine is a clinical practice fortified by complex narrative skills that equip healthcare professionals to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved to action by patients’ and colleagues’ stories of illness. Founded in 2000 at Columbia University by the authors of this volume, narrative medicine provides rigorous conceptual frameworks and practical clinical methods to increase the accuracy and scope of clinicians’ knowledge of their patients and to deepen their therapeutic partnerships. This book presents the authors’ views, enriched by collaboration with a worldwide network of colleagues, of the workings of the narrative, relational, and reflexive processes of healthcare. Literary theory, narratology, continental philosophies, aesthetic theory, and cultural studies provide the intellectual foundations of narrative medicine, while primary care practice, patient-centered care, psychoanalysis, and interprofessional practice supply the clinical foundations.The book provides both principles and practices of the central tenets of the discipline—relationality and emotion, the philosophies of embodiment, ethicality, participatory pedagogy, close reading, creativity, and clinical practice. Each Part of this volume explains the conceptual foundations of its subject and demonstrates the pedagogic or clinical methods of putting those principles into action. Narrative medicine has grown since its inception into an international movement including many health professional disciplines, patients, families, and institutions.The overarching goal of narrative medicine is to improve the effectiveness of healthcare. This volume provides the standards of the field’s theory and practice as a guide to all who are now joining in this creative commitment to improve healthcare for all.
Narrative Medicine to integrate patients’, caregivers’ and clinicians’ migraine experiences: the DRONE multicentre project
