Tag: identity

Narrative Medicine activity using Rearranged: An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer and Life Transposed

Rearranged: An Opera Singer's Facial Cancer and Life Transposed is Kathleen Watt's memoir of her diagnosis and treatment for osteosarcoma. In an article in Teaching and Learning in Medicine, medical student Emmanuel Greenberg and internal medicine hospitalist Elizabeth Lahti provide a narrative medicine activity using Watt's book. Greenberg and Lahti provide a brief summary of the work, noting how Watts' short chapters narrate jher movement through the healthcare system as well as the day-to-day realities of her illness and the ways it impacts her identity and relationships. Greenberg and Lahti each reflect on their own responses to Watts' work. They note that clinicians' own life stories are part of any clinical encounter and they explore (and model) how this kind of self-reflection can improve understanding and patient care. Their article concludes by identifying a passage from Watts' book and providing brief instructions and writing prompts for a narrative medicine activity.

Silenced

Donna Lambers, a maternal/fetal medicine specialist, describes the impact on her medical practice and sense of self when her vocal cords are affected by a thyroidectomy for thyroid cancer. She loses the ability to control vocal inflection. "For instance," she writes, "I’m unable to raise my voice at the end of a question... I can no longer tease or kid or be sarcastic with my family and friends, because it comes off sounding mean. My voice, having lost its cadences, is unpleasant to hear; and now, when giving perinatal counseling to my patients, I have no way to convey the empathy and emotion I feel for them..." She describes with great insight the many ways this has affected her interactions with patients, their families, and co-workers, as well as the frustrations she experiences. The story could open up a discussion about the ways in which effective communication requires more than simply clear transmission of information and the taken-for-granted ways that we construct relationships and enact identities through subtle cues. It also speaks to the challenges of this particular non-visible disability.

Music Therapy in Larry’s Life

This five minute video from AMTA music therapy shares Larry’s story, a musician, teacher, father, and husband who lost many functions following a seizure. The video contains an interview with his wife, and board certified music therapist Moreen Bosch, to show how music has helped Larry regain his self-confidence and joy in music. This video could be used to examine the role of arts, specifically music therapy, in the healing process.

Health Narratives syllabus

This is a syllabus for an undergraduate junior/senior level semester-long course at Lewis & Clark College. The course focuses on how stories of health and illness are a place to explore the rhetoric of identities, relationships, health care, and public policy. For example: How do we use narratives to (re)construct identities altered by illness? How can narratives (re)shape interactions between patients and health care providers? What narratives capture public attention and with what implications for health care decision-making and policy? The course covers theories and research on health narratives and narrative research methods. It serves as an overview to this area of research as well as a training ground for doing your narrative research. The course is an elective for students in the Rhetoric & Media Studies major but also draws students from sociology, English, and pre-health. The course is a 25 person seminar-style course for juniors and seniors.