Healing Begins With Listening

 What can we learn from this book? If you’re seeing a primary doctor for the first time, and they don’t let you tell your story about what’s wrong, find a new doctor. The patient-doctor connection needs to be a relationship, not a transaction.

In her preface, Dr. Rita Charon lays out what her book, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (2006), is about: “narrative medicine [is] defined as medicine practiced with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness.” She goes on to say that it provides “health care professionals with practical wisdom in comprehending what patients endure in illness and what they themselves undergo in the care of the sick.”

Cancer Doctors Have Emotions

 

Laura Vater, oncologist

This is an aspect of cancer care that I’ve been waiting for — the emotions of a doctor caring for cancer patients.

I discovered the writing of Dr. Laura Vater because her essay “Goodbye Stethoscope” was also in the 2025 issue of The Examined Life Journal published by the Carver College of Medicine in Iowa. I was drawn in by its honesty and compassion.

Cancer Patients Are Not Cars

 The Gift of Narrative Medicine 

Courses on narrative medicine are offered in some premed programs and medical schools. They are an important addition to the scientific coursework because they remind future doctors and nurses that they, and their patients, are human beings who have emotions that need to be tended to. The courses train medical people how to listen and interpret what patients say, as well as notice when patients are reluctant to share something. These courses aren’t offered at every medical school, and generally there is only one course. But it creates an awareness of the gift of listening that strengthens as the years go on.