{"id":3655,"date":"2023-07-18T19:04:28","date_gmt":"2023-07-18T19:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medschool.prd.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/?p=3655"},"modified":"2023-07-20T03:25:02","modified_gmt":"2023-07-20T03:25:02","slug":"physicians-words-patients-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/physicians-words-patients-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Physicians\u2019 words, patients\u2019 stories"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Elizabeth Ebbens, MD, reads aloud her first-person narrative. Photo by Erin O. Smith.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Elizabeth Ebbens, MD, recently stood before fellows, residents and faculty to share words she\u2019d written about a feverish 5-year-old\u2019s emergency room visit.<\/p>\n

The child\u2019s mother voiced fear about the \u201cC\u201d word. Ebbens, a pediatric emergency medicine fellow, thought the patient\u2019s mother feared COVID, so she ordered a COVID-19 test as well as labs to check blood cell counts and electrolytes. Despite normal findings, Ebbens\u2019 reassurances were futile. That\u2019s when she discovered the \u201cC\u201d word that was causing such anxiety was actually cancer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI see how much COVID has changed me,\u201d Ebbens wrote. \u201cAnd I would assume COVID is everyone\u2019s worst fear. Truly COVID-19 was the worst of all things for such a long time \u2014 death, the end of the world. Yet for all its terror, COVID gave us just another name on a list of cuss words, cancer among them.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo all my patients and their parents, to everyone, I acknowledge the ghosts of our darker COVID days still live in my chest years later. All of us in health care, from policymakers to front-line providers, are trying to bring peace back into the room\u2026Moving from COVID-crushed to COVID-touched, we are learning to breathe again, trying to avoid the next worst thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ebbens wrote these words as part of the inaugural class of the Medical Humanities GME Certificate Program offered in 2022-23 to residents and fellows at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Over nine months, she and 12 others learned to apply narrative medicine techniques to their own patients. Several class members even had original works submitted and published in medical journals.<\/p>\n

Narrative medicine is a holistic practice approach that draws upon patients\u2019 life stories \u2014 beyond diagnoses and lab values \u2014 to improve their care. Medical humanities integrate arts and humanities into medical practice. The certificate program\u2019s founders argue that narrative and storytelling are essential roots of medicine and are deeply relevant, even in the hustle of modern practice.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis certificate program was born of the deep belief that there\u2019s no such thing as nonnarrative medicine, and that we can practice the skills we\u2019ve learned through narrative medicine and oral history to become better physicians,\u201d said Megan Dupuis, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Medicine. \u201cAnd that writing, reading and storytelling connect us more deeply to the patients we care for every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dupuis co-directs the program with Chase Webber, DO, assistant professor of Clinical Medicine. Narrative medicine is usually taught to medical students, and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine has a long tradition of this. Webber and Dupuis felt it was vital for residents and fellows to have a refresher.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe workload of residency is so challenging that finding a way to pull away from that and reflect with peers in a shared space, within a community of practice, was really the vision and the hope for this,\u201d Webber said.<\/p>\n

Ebbens, who now carries a notebook in the pocket of her scrubs, said writing helps her to process events, especially difficult ones, that occur during her clinical practice.<\/p>\n

\u201cI previously wrote poetry and played lots of music,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd then residency happened. And I had a three-year drought. This program has given me confidence that I can write, and it\u2019s something I\u2019m actually good at.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople say, \u2018Oh, the humanities, that\u2019s the soft side. We are hard science here!\u2019 But this is how we get through it. We are telling each other stories \u2014 often unconsciously \u2014 all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elizabeth Ebbens, MD, recently stood before fellows, residents and faculty to share words she\u2019d written about a feverish 5-year-old\u2019s emergency room visit. The child\u2019s mother voiced fear about the \u201cC\u201d word. Ebbens, a pediatric emergency medicine fellow, thought the patient\u2019s mother feared COVID, so she ordered a COVID-19 test as well as labs to check…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":228,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[11,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vm-around-the-medical-center","category-vm-summer-2023"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcDnub-WX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/228"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3655"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3788,"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3655\/revisions\/3788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}