Evidence

How Storytelling Heals

Over the past ten years, Medicine has transcended the mechanical model as conveyed in the 1910 Flexner Report. The purely pathology approach now expands to include the humanity of the patient and of the provider. The instrument driving this evolution is writing and telling our stories.

Narrative Medicine (both Columbia model and Coyote Medicine model), Expressive Writing (formed by Dr. James Pennebaker), Poetic Medicine (formed by John Fox), Proprioceptive Writing (formed by Linda Trichter Metcalf), Poetic Research (formed by Corrine Glesne), Expressive Arts Therapy are a few of the Trojan Horses inside which creative writing penetrated the Flexnerian fortress.

In England, Ireland, Scotland, and in the European Union, Social Prescribing for the Arts reflects the success of researchers who are transforming Medicine to be about much more than our bodies. Under this system patients can turn to cellists, singers, poets, and dancers for care of symptoms that medicine does not reach. This surge of interest in Storytelling in healthcare draws together two worlds that have been set at great distances from one another.

It was clear when two books entitled Narrative Medicine that the rigid, unforgiving, objectifying, fatigue-driven model was about to change. Watching Medicine discover Stories and Poetry, as a storyteller and a poet, is like watching a friend discover a treasure that you had hidden. Only, writers and poets haven’t intentionally hidden their work. A very high and thick wall had gone up between them, placed there by Sir Isaac Newton and the Royal Society. Three hundred years later we would discover he wrote a fair amount of poetry and even devoted the greater part of his research to proving teachings of Alchemy.

This generation of practitioners is spared the call to separate from emotion. They are told that Storytelling (in the various terms that assure us it’s all still science) is as valid a tool as a thermometer. (They are also told that they are not to analyze the story but to listen, to turn off that judgment mind for just a few seconds or a couple of minutes.) One could say that medicine is healing itself.

Here are a tiny sample of vast and valuable articles and evidence-based data.