This book presents practical ways to communicate health messages and is intended to serve as an easy-to-use guide to health communication. In addition, it has won several awards. These include esteemed awards from the American Medical Writers Association....
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Illness narratives: time, hope and HIV
Life-threatening diseases such as HIV/AIDS also threaten people's sense of identity and taken for granted assumptions about the temporal shape of their lives. In response, people often experience shifts in values, spirituality and life...
A Narrative Approach to Healing Chronic Illness Thomas R. Egnew, EdD, LICSW
Many physicians may feel ill-equipped to deal with the patient's suffering resulting from the ailments associated with chronic illness. This essay takes up the thesis that chronically and terminally ill patients can be healed holistically,...
Personal Illness Narratives: Using Reflective Writing to Teach Empathy
Reflective writing is one proven method for teaching medical students to interact empathetically with patients. Most such exercises are based on students' reflection on clinical experiences. However, in order to effectively extract, interpret and...
Illness narratives: fact or fiction?
There is now a renewed interest in narrative analysis in the humanities, social sciences and medicine. Disease narratives are of particular interest in health-related settings. This article discusses the background to this interest....
Illness narratives: reliability, authenticity and the empathic witness
Text analysis theories are applied to understanding medical histories, clinicians and scholars have the opportunity to develop a more nuanced and multi-faceted appreciation of these accounts. A patient's story is rarely 'just a story', but is rather a conscious and unconscious...
A Conceptual Framework for the Use of Illness Narratives in Medical Education
The use of narratives, including doctors' and patients' stories, literature and film, is increasingly popular in medical education. However, there is a need for an overarching conceptual framework to guide these efforts, which are often dismissed as...
Physician-Patient Co-Construction of Illness Narratives in the Medical Interview
Researchers and medical educators in the field of doctor-patient communication encourage doctors to elicit patient narratives during medical encounters to facilitate data collection, relationship building and patient satisfaction. However, these scholars convey little ...
Narrative Medicine A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust
Effective medical practice requires narrative competence, that is, the ability to recognise, assimilate, interpret and respond to the stories and fates of others. Medicine practised with narrative competence, known as narrative medicine, is proposed as a model of...
Narrative Medicine in Surgical Education
This article proposes the use of written narrative reflection to capture and measure the generic competencies of systems-based practice, practice-based learning, communication skills and professionalism. As part of a pilot study, students...
Use of narrative medicine to identify key factors for effective doctor-patient relationships in severe asthma
In this project, the authors use a narrative medicine (NM) approach to assess the promotion of trust in the relationship between doctors and their asthma patients. Doctors who were able to listen to their patients with empathy (35%) were more likely to make shared decisions with...
A qualitative study of clinical narrative competence of medical personnel
Despite the in-depth discussion of narrative medicine, there is limited research on narrative competence in the literature; thus, this study aims to explore the dimensions and clinical connotations of narrative competence in medical staff. The study ...
Beyond the Margins: Reflective Writing and Development of Reflective Capacity in Medical Education
The ability to reflect has been described as an essential feature of professional and competent clinical practice. Reflection has recently been linked to promoting the effective use of feedback in medical education and associated with improved accuracy ...
Narrative medicine in a hectic schedule
The shift to patient-centred medical practice is important to ensure appropriate and sustainable healthcare. Narrative medicine suggests that patients should be meaningfully involved in diagnosis and treatment. Thus, to understand the importance of ...
Narrative medicine applications for neuro-oncology patient identity and quality of life
This article explores the use of narrative medicine (NM) in the clinical care of brain cancer patients whose identity and quality of life are compromised by their disease and treatment. The narratives of four brain cancer patients provided examples of...