presenting: the healing power of story
"We would never graduate someone from medical school who didn’t know their pharmacology," DasGupta says. "We also shouldn’t graduate someone who doesn’t know how to listen to a story."
Innovation can be potentially harmful to the doctor-patient relationship if it replaces deep listening. A story and an MRI need to be considered equally. You need both of them to do good healing. They are both necessary to each other."
It is slippery ground, she says: "Stories change, depending on who is telling them and when. We have to allow for that ambiguity. You are interacting with people, and people are not fixed, undynamic entities."
Listening is also an act of "narrative humility" that calls for a readjustment of ideas of power.
Sept 15 & 16
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