Health Story Type: Journal Article

How and Why Patients Made Long Covid

This article documents the central role of patient narratives in establishing “long haul COVID” as a phenomenon. The article explores how case studies, Tweets with a shared hash tag, and high profile news stories of individual patient experiences challenged conventional medical wisdom during the early period of COVID. The article also acknowledges that power differences in whose stories receive attention played a role in “long haul” being accepted. This is a brief article that could be assigned in conjunction with first-person narratives to explore how patient narratives are related to accepted medical knowledge, research agendas, and public health communication.

COVID-19 through the Eyes of a Black Medical Student

Shuaibu Ali is a medical student who reflects on how his experiences growing up in an urban environment increased his risk for various health conditions. He makes the case for the importance of personal stories from individuals from historically marginalized groups as a way of personalizing statistics on health disparities and exposing conditions that create them.

I have used this essay in an undergraduate narrative medicine practicum class to prompt discussion about the importance of hearing stories from marginalized groups and the power of story to mobilize social change.

Grand unified theory of female pain

Loosely connected series of observations and thoughts about women and pain, some literary, some from the author’s own experience. One theme is how often womens’ pain is ignored or downplayed as bid for attention.

Wait times: Slipping through the cracks in the emergency room.

A man tells the story of watching his wife suffer agonizing pain for several hours from an ovarian torsion, eventually losing the ovary, and uses that as a starting point to describe how often women’s pain is dismissed by doctors and other caregivers, especially other women.

The story could also prompt discussion of how to account for the health care provider behavior in this story. Do we blame incompetent and insensitive health care providers? What features of their working conditions might produce the behavior this story recounts?