Among life experiences, facing a major disease could push towards silence or the opposite, inciting to turn the personal course into a story. That’s the idea behind narrative medicine

Doctor to patient communication is often a painful crux, and the exercise of explaining and understanding might be such difficult to put the effectiveness of a theraphy at risk. If ten minutes is the average duration of a medical examination – six hundred seconds to inform, clearly insufficient to share anything – a new discipline came out some years ago. Narrative medicine offers the tools for the individual to express all that is around the illness, and build a different relationship with doctors and caregivers. This peculiar storytelling has a therapeutic potential in itself, but it also helps the doctor to come closer to the patient, thus supporting customized treatment.

More or less consciously around narrative medicine, we have seen many movies and books (one for all: Wondy, by Francesca Del Rosso), blogs and contests (as Donna sopra le righe, dedicated to women experiencing breast cancer), and the commitment of organizations such as AIRC, sharing encouraging ‘stories of hope‘. And there are medical clinics too, as the one just opened in Rieti, first in Italy.

What urges someone to tell his or her story? Reasons might be totally different. As explained by Bianca Borriello, storyteller and trainer, “In our daily lives we are moms, workers, and so on. Then the illness comes and there’s a fracture: everything continues to flow, and you get out of the story. Narrative puts your own story back into the flow. […] When we write, we choose what to give to others. The goal is to get closer, trust the other to take a piece of ourselves and learn more about the territory we are living in, what it looks like. The benefit for the listener is the possibility to experience the disease through the storyteller, being taught without actually bearing it”.

Bianca explained what the sense of narrative medicine is, and what ‘stories of happy progress’ can achieve in a TEDx Talk. Telling probably more than we can grasp.