Narrative Thinking in Clinical Care

Welcome to another episode of The Words Matter Podcast.

In this episode of the clinical reasoning series, I’m speaking with Sanja Maretic. Sanja is an osteopath who works in a non-traditional osteopathic role as a pain clinician in the pain management service.

Sanja has a background in humanities and passion for the intersection between healthcare and humanities and as such she published a qualitative study titled “Understanding patients' narratives” A qualitative study of osteopathic educators’ opinions about using Medical Humanities in undergraduate education (see paper here). And Sanja wrote a truly captivating review for the CauseHealth book which I have linked here.

So on this episode we speak about,

• Narrative-based approaches and the role and function of narratives in the care of people.
• Structural competency (see paper here by Metzl and Hansen) as a framework to appreciate the complex social contexts and structures which guide people health, illness and recovery (see paper on narrative humility here by DasGupta).
• How hearing our patients’ narratives enables us to know and see them, the social structures surrounding their lives and environment
• How narrative analysis can be used to think critically about our practice and the narratives which surround our clinical realities.
• How incorporating the arts, poetry and humanities into healthcare education will help widen the therapeutic gaze of clinicians beyond the mere biomedical.
• Sanja’s experience of journeying and finding her way into a multidisciplinary pain setting.
• The notion of ‘listening hands’ in relation to touch and palpation in manual therapy and how this may or may not facilitate the construction and understanding of a person’s narrative and life-world.

This was such a wonderful conversation; Sanja speaks truly as a clinician in the way she passionately describes her work and her endeavour to better understand and the lives of those people she cares for.

Find Sanja on Twitter @MareticSanja and Instagram @MareticSanja

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