NARRATIVE POSSIBILITIES
Interprofessional education has become one of the pinnacles of medical education at UNE COM. While medical students soak in the clinical knowledge and skills of their academic curriculum, interdisciplinary opportunities expose them to a myriad of relevant and diverse experiences that help prepare them for their clinical years ahead.
Tell Me What Hurts: Story Telling and the Healing Arts is an interprofessional symposium that took place at the UNE Biddeford campus on September 13, 2018. Hosted by the Maine Women Writers Collection at UNE and the School of English at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, the event was co-sponsored by almost twenty UNE colleges and departments (including the College of Osteopathic Medicine) to celebrate the art of story and its relationship to physical, spiritual, and emotional healing. Hedy Wald, PhD, presented one of the keynote addresses entitled, “Caring for Our Patients, Our Students, Ourselves: The Power of Narrative.” In her talk, Dr. Wald pulled from her own personal experiences as well as her work as a clinical professor of Family Medicine at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and Director of Resident Resilience/Wellbeing-Residency Programs in Child Neurology and Neurodevelopmental Disabilities at Boston Children’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School.
According to Dr. Wald, the power of narrative is its ability to humanize both the healthcare worker and the patient. It has the transformative power to “deepen understanding of the patient’s experience of illness, cultivate and preserve empathy, and foster reflective capacity, ideally strengthening the physician-patient relationship.”1 In her talk, Dr. Wald reflected on what it means to be a human being; obviously, we all are human, but the language we use often skews our compassion for one another. An influential writer, activist and teacher, Susan Sontag, once said, "Love
The Healing Art of Narrative
Arooba Almas, DO ’18 speaks about the importance of narrative medicine at the Tell Me What Hurts: Story Telling and the Healing Arts Symposium