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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