Ivy Sea Online: Storytelling for Health

Mention storytelling, and many people conjure up shamans, children’s nighttime rituals or an Irish shanachie. And yet those very images hint to places and times in history where the story æ and the storyteller æ were revered forms of communication. Even now, storytelling is a powerful, mainstream approach to communicating within organizations of all types, emphasizing human connections. Stories put us in context and connect individual bits of information to the bigger picture, increasing our understanding of the details and the vision.

Modern healthcare offers a prime example of how storytelling can be integrated into mainstream practice. Healthcare professionals — taking a page from their ancient forebears — are prescribing it to help providers and patients learn, understand and interact with each other more effectively. In a field of practice criticized for the many ways it can dehumanize and detach, storytelling in healthcare helps to personalize and reconnect. For example:

• The Duke (University) Center for Integrative Medicine’s journal, The Chronicle, advocates storytelling in articles such as, "Storytelling is Crucial to the Healing of Human Suffering."

• In her best selling book, "Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal," pediatrician Rachel Naomi Remen emphasizes the healing power of storytelling in her work as medical director of the Commonwealth Cancer Help Program. She also shares these insights with the medical students that she teaches at the University of California at San Francisco.

• The medicine of indigenous people has always emphasized the importance of storytelling to facilitate the integration of life experiences into the process of healing.

• Time Slips is a Milwaukee-based research project in which artists, caregivers and people with dementia are seeing if creative storytelling can help open communication with and understanding of people with Alzheimer's disease. Check it out online.

• Morbidity & Mortality sessions are a safe venue for surgeons to discuss and share learnings gained from experiences in the operating room.

• In-person and online support groups and hotlines are available for most health issues, and are extremely popular ways for people to share their personal stories with those who understand them most, and to gain strength from others’ stories.

• The Storytelling Foundation International helps healthcare specialists and those who minister to others use storytelling to comfort the sick and dying, promote healing, and create a more nurturing environment for people to deal with suffering and grief. Check it out online.

• The Virtual Pediatric Patient is a digital storytelling system for teaching common pediatric problems. Typically, the best way to learn medicine is from a real patient. However, finding real patients and the time to learn from them is becoming more and more difficult, leading to a crisis in clinical education. Multimedia learning allows educators to create virtual patients that students can learn from when a real patient is not available. Check it out online.

• Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, MD and author of "On Death and Dying, Life Lessons and The Wheel of Life," invited patients to share their stories at a healthcare lecture, describing the difficulties they experienced at the hands of healthcare providers. The purpose of this presentation was "to sensitize healthcare practitioners to the fact that they treated people, not just symptoms and illnesses."

This information provides food for thought rather than counsel specifically designed to meet the needs of your organization. Please use it mindfully. The most effective approaches are those that have been tailored to your unique needs and organizational culture, so if it fits your interests and budget, connect with an adviser whose perspective you trust and value. Have questions? Feel free to send us an email.