Poetry may not be common in the medical setting. But more hospitals and medical schools are turning to the power of the written word, and poetry in particular, to help patients process their conditions and heal. The Northwestern doctors are studying whether it’s feasible for busy doctors to carve out time for poetry with inpatients. They’re examining how patients reflect on the process. They’re also interviewing patients after the reading to see if the poetry affects their quality of life and relationship with the physician.
Dr. [Joshua] Hauser says the poems often elicit patients’ memories about their youth or their parents, or reflections on their illness and mortality.
“By looking at a piece of text which has some uncertainty or ambiguity, I think they are able to reflect back on their illness in a way that direct questions might not get to,” Dr. Hauser says.
His team hopes to do a larger study and include other VA hospitals if it can secure funding.
Other hospitals around the U.S. are also using poetry. At Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, cancer patients can dictate poetry and reflective writing as they get chemotherapy.
At the Haslinger Pediatric Palliative Care Center at Akron Children’s Hospital in Ohio, the narrative medicine coordinator became a full-time job in May due to increasing requests for her services.
And at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Rafael Campo, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and poetry section editor of the medical journal JAMA, holds writing workshops and poetry seminars with patients and staff.
“We don’t always have a cure in medicine, but poetry can actually heal in a broader sense, and so I think many patients feel healed even in the absence of a medical cure for their illness,” Dr. Campo says….
In addition to understanding its impact on patients, the doctors aim to see if reading poetry with patients has the potential to help alleviate doctor burnout. “This is a way of moving the clinician closer to their patients, being part of their experience and their world,” Dr. Hauser says.
Huntsman Cancer Institute writer-in-residence Susan Sample says that though she also works with other genres, poetry provides something special for patients.
“It’s like a different language,” says Dr. Sample, an assistant professor in medical ethics and humanities at the University of Utah. “I think that poetry works really well when people are writing about their innermost experiences, because those are experiences that are often unfamiliar, they are foreign.”
For other posts on healing through the arts and humanities, see here.
This is not surprising. I use poetry all the time in chaplaincy work. Most people respond very enthusiastically. My experience is that poetry enables or facilitates conversation around an individual’s inner world while avoiding potential pitfalls which can occur when using more conventional theological vocabulary.