Narrative medicine in a hectic schedule

Seeing Your Stories: Visualization for Narrative Medicine

Importance: Narrative medicine (NM), in which patient stories play a crucial role in their diagnosis and treatment, can potentially support a more holistic approach to patient care than traditional scientific ones. However, there are some challenges in the implementation of narrative medicine, for example, differences in understanding illnesses between physicians and patients and physicians' increased workloads and overloaded schedules. This paper first presents a review to explore previous visualization research for narrative medicine to bridge the gap between visualization researchers and narrative medicine experts and explore further visualization opportunities. Highlights: The review is conducted from 2 perspectives: (a) the contexts and domains in which visualization has been explored for narrative medicine and (b) the forms and solutions applied in these studies. Four applied domains are defined, including understanding patients from narrative records, medical communication, medical conversation training in education, and psychotherapy and emotional wellness enhancement. Conclusions: A future work framework illustrates some opportunities for future research, including groups of specific directions and future points for the 4 domains and 3 technological exploration opportunities (combination of narrative and medical data visualization, task-audience-based visual storytelling, and user-centered interactive visualization). Specifically, 3 directions of future work in medical communication (asynchronous online physician-patient communication, synchronous face-to-face medical conversation, and medical knowledge dissemination) were concluded.

The Influence of Personal Health Data on the Health Coaching Process

Tracking health data, for example, through wearable devices or health apps, is increasingly commonplace. Consequently, health coaches (e.g., personal trainers, dieticians) are facing growing numbers of clients who bring their data to the clinic. These data potentially add value to the coaching process, for example, by showing more objective and specific information on clients' behaviors. However, in practice, it turns out to be hard to effectively utilize health data in a coaching setting, and it is not yet fully understood how data affect the coaching process and the coach-client communication. We organized a workshop (12 coaches, 3 clients) and a field study (5 coaches, 6 clients), where we observed coach-client interactions enriched with data. By including both familiar and unfamiliar coach-client pairs, as well as alternating the timing of the data presented (i.e., at the beginning, or halfway through the session), we acquired a variety of data-driven coaching interactions and analyzed this using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods. Our results show that data are not “plug-and-play.” There is an extensive process of interpreting and contextualizing data, in which the client has a key role, which is essential to gain relevant and actionable insights from the data useful to the coaching process. We also observed that data affect the coach-client communication on both content and relationship levels. We will reflect on these insights in terms of design recommendations for wearable tracking devices and e-health technology to effectively support health coaches and their interactions with their clients.

Health Care Practitioners and Families Writing Together: The Three-Minute Mental Makeover

INTRODUCTION

Expressive writing, the process of self-expression through writing, appears to have beneficial effects. Our hospital's narrative medicine group developed an expressive writing tool, the Three-Minute Mental Makeover (3MMM).

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate the effectiveness of the 3MMM to reduce stress and optimize communication between health care practitioners and their patients/families.

METHODS

Patients and families were recruited from a Chicago-area children's hospital from December 2016 through July 2017, from the neonatal intensive care unit, pediatric intensive care unit, inpatient pediatric unit, and outpatient pediatric clinics. Health care practitioners included a pediatric cardiologist, pediatric residents, child development specialists, and pediatric nurses. Practitioner and patient family participants completed prestudy and poststudy surveys to assess perceived stress and communication levels. Using a standardized script, practitioners led the 3MMM activity, writing concurrently with patients/families. Participants then shared their responses. Presurvey and postsurvey data were compared using nonparametric tests.

RESULTS

Eight practitioners led 96 patient/family members in 3MMM activities and study surveys. At baseline, all patients, family members, and practitioners reported experiencing 1 or more symptoms of stress. After participating in the 3MMM, patients/family members and practitioners reported reduced stress compared with baseline (p < 0.001). A significant improvement in communication was reported by practitioners (p < 0.001). Eighty-eight percent of patients/families reported that the 3MMM activity was helpful, even though only 35% had used writing or journaling in the past.

CONCLUSION

The 3MMM is a short writing exercise that reduces stress for practitioners, patients, and families. Future studies may help determine long-term effects of the 3MMM.

Ethics in Narrative Health Interventions

The thrust of narrative medicine is that patients and communities construct stories that guide their lives and give meaning to both health and illness. The responsibility of health care practitioners, therefore, is to learn how to read these local narratives to provide care that is relevant to an individual or community. Given the recognition that interaction must be tailored to the subjective experiences of patients and their communities, can there be universal ethical standards in the treatment of illness? We argue that the constructed nature of patient experiences does not pose a threat to making ethical clinical judgments. The solution to this dilemma requires that the traditional distinction between objectivity and subjectivity be eschewed by clinicians in favor of establishing dialogue with patients. Narratives are never created alone and are therefore not esoteric. Listening carefully to patients' stories is an ethical practice that can be fostered in health care settings. Subjectivity can be embraced by clinicians without jeopardizing ethical or evidence-based patient care.

Narrative methods for assessing "quality of life" in hand transplantation: five case studies with bioethical commentary

Despite having paved the way for face, womb and penis transplants, hand transplantation today remains a small hybrid of reconstructive microsurgery and transplant immunology. An exceptionally limited patient population internationally (N < 200) complicates medical researchers' efforts to parse outcomes "objectively." Presumed functional and psychosocial benefits of gaining a transplant hand must be weighed in both patient decisions and bioethical discussions against the difficulty of adhering to post-transplant medications, the physical demands of hand transplant recovery on the patient, and the serious long-term health risks of immunosuppressant drugs. This paper relates five narratives of hand transplantation drawn from an oral history project to show how narrative methods can and should inform ethical evaluations and the clinical process of hand transplantation. The interviews with patients and their partners analyzed here lead us to suggest that qualitative accounts of patient experiences should be used to complement clinical case studies reported in medical journals and to help develop instruments to assess outcomes more systematically.

Enhancing second-order empathy in medical practice by supplementing patients' narratives with certainties

Most scholars agree that empathy is one of the keys for medical education, but it is not yet clear precisely how this term should be defined. Currently, the predominant tendency in this area consists in considering empathy within the context of narrative medicine or, more specifically, within the interaction theory instead of the simulation theory of empathy. A significant development of the interaction theory is "second-order empathy". After describing the outlines of this kind of empathy, I suggest that the practitioner should also inquire about the patient's certainties - in Wittgenstein's sense - in order the better to enrich and understand her narrative. Besides offering examples of how certainties may contribute to reaching a clearer perspective of the patient's narratives and, thus, to strengthen second-order empathy with her, guidelines are provided to train medical students in identifying such certainties.