"Winter of Fear" with Allison Coffelt

In this episode, we continue our celebration of Spooky season by exploring the concept of fear in medicine with Allison Coffelt, an award winning author, poet, and teacher who focuses on narrative medicine. She shares with us her piece titled “Winter of Fear”, a poem published in JAMA in April 2021 about caring for patients during the height of the COVID pandemic and the inevitable feelings of loneliness, uncertainty, and fear that arose. We discuss how poetry offers a unique lens through which we can view and reflect upon the world around us and how it provides a platform to explore word choice intentionality and style variations to capture sentiment.