The doctor and patient in care: cardiologist Marco Testa explains the worth of narrative medicine. From the interview:

For me, Narrative Medicine represents above all a return to the most authentic origins of the medical profession. As Karl Jaspers already told us several decades ago, and ever since, the medical profession has been going in a hyper-technological direction that risks leading us to repair the body, or rather often only isolated organs, rather than to fully cure a person.

Narrative Medicine has allowed me, as I hope it will for many others, to rediscover that relational dimension that I had already learned during my university years. During this time, I followed a medical anthropology and bioethics course by Professor Sandro Spinsanti, a true pioneer for Italy, and beyond, in the necessary reacquisition of medicine’s soul. It was a true Copernican revolution, putting the person back at the centre gave me new motivation for my profession.

For me, Narrative Medicine is first and foremost a ‘posture’ – as Paolo Trenta masterfully explains – a way of being in the care relationship that recognizes in the other not an object of study, but a bearer of meaning, a person whose disease carries all its existential baggage….

Narrative Medicine serves the carer because it enables him/her to offer better, more comprehensive, and more effective medicine. When we integrate narrative listening with clinical interview and diagnostics, we achieve a bio-psycho-social personalisation of the care pathway that goes far beyond what we can achieve with Evidence-Based Medicine alone.

In my work as a cardiologist, I have found that when a patient with heart failure tells me that his heart is “like an engine that runs on hiccups,” he is not just describing a symptom, he is offering me access to the world of his experience. The metaphors that patients use in my studies allow us to adapt our communication and support patients from an existential point of view as well. For example, I have seen how those who accept a defibrillator describe it as a ‘parachute’ or ‘safety net,’ while those who do not accept them view a defibrillator as an ‘intruder.’

But Narrative Medicine also serves the practitioner, as it protects him from burnout. As Anatole Broyard says, ‘giving up some of the authoritativeness of the doctor in exchange for more humanity is not a bad deal, because by learning to relate more with his patients, the doctor can learn to love his work better’. Shifting from a performance logic to a relational logic also has huge advantages for us practitioners: being recognised as people, with our skills but also our weaknesses, helps us to prevent emotional exhaustion.

For other posts on narrative medicine, see here.