What the Hell Is Narrative Medicine? Listening as a Healing Art with Julia Schneider
1 month ago
- Listening is the intervention: The studies Julia points to find that clinicians interrupt patients within roughly eleven seconds, yet the average patient needs only about two minutes to tell their whole story. Narrative medicine is largely the practice of asking one open-ended question and then staying quiet long enough to actually hear the answer.
- Pain lives in more than the tissues: Julia reframes persistent pain through a biopsychosocial lens, where the nervous system can learn to signal danger long after the injury has healed. She describes working with a patient’s SIMs (the things that create a felt sense of safety) and DIMs (the things that create a felt sense of danger), because the same diagnosis can read as a threat or as a plan, depending on how it is held.
- Burnout is often a form of grief: Julia and I land on the idea that burnout can be grief over what we thought this profession would be. Her antidote is connection, the “why did you become this?” question she has every workshop tuck into a back pocket, and the reminder that, as she puts it, grief is love with no place to go.
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