Bringing the doctor inside the care: the use of stories in doctor-patient communication

Abstract

Narrative-Based Medicine is a recent important area of research and practice which aims to provide theoretical and empirical constructs for medical practice and doctor-patient communication. In health services, medical patient-centred practices are usually built on the needs of patients while taking as much of an individualized perspective as possible, which sometimes involves a great expenditure of time and energy by the health staff and their clients. This paper aims to study the role of patient-physician communication and the current evidence on NBM in light of recent research in cognitive studies about autobiographical memory and narrative. To this end, we will stress the need for a solid and careful connection between medical patient-centred practices and theoretical constructs of narrative theories, proposing a model based on new theories on social development of the autobiographical memory.

Keywords

• Narrative-based medicine
• memory
• patient
• doctor
• communication
• autobiography