Narrative Based Medicine for healthcare professionals and cancer patients

Unlike the Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) approach, which tends not to consider the particularity of the subject, understood as unicum, in recent years a new “sensitivity” has spread in the Medical Faculties of many countries - European and non-European - and a different way of understanding medical-health practice: Narrative Based Medicine (NBM). This supports the need for social and health workers to learn to pay attention to patient stories and understand their emotional experience, but also to reflect on themselves, their emotions in confronting the disease and how they affect perceptions and on clinical practice. Rita Charon, director of magazine “Literature and Medicine” (Columbia University, USA) and leading exponent of the Narrative Medicine movement, supports the relevance, in the training of health professionals, of the narrative element, defined as a set of listening skills , analyze, interpret, share stories. The narration of one’s illness, if on the one hand, helps the patient to rationalize and put order in the chaos of emotions he is experiencing, to transfer anxieties, fears, fears, to acquire greater self-control and to find meaning in his own experience of illness, on the other hand helps doctors to grow in humanity, to the exercise of analysis and self-criticism, avoiding the risk that compressed emotions may turn into a cynical detachment or reappear, later, in the form of frustration, burn -out, etc. Narrative appears on the scene when medicine, having reached extraordinary technological development goals, seems to lose its effectiveness precisely in the relationship with the patient and, consequently, in the identification and management of those states of suffering that are not pathology but they are no longer health, building a bridge between science and the worlds of life. Narrative Medicine stimulates not only a process of existential and relational anamnesis of the patient’s experience, but also the co-construction between doctor and patient of the meaning of the patient’s experience and the progressive opening of biomedicine to the contributions of complementary medicines, in addition to growth a fruitful dialogue with pedagogy, sociology, psychology and anthropology. The narrativity in medicine is acquiring a role of increasing importance as a method to investigate and make hypotheses, as an investigation to collect new data, as a theory that acts as a meeting point between professionals who start from different conceptual settings and thinking traditions.