Difficult Doctors, Difficult Patients: a Comic for Empathy-Building

People usually don’t have courses in school on empathy: how to be compassionate towards each other. There are some professions, however, where empathy is part of the formal learning process — with health care professionals leading the way, learning how to listen and how to consider the patient’s perspective. This is critical for any context in which doctors and patients need to communicate, but even more so when they seek to collaborate. But don’t doctors and nurses deserve empathy, too? At the University of Michigan, this was the question we faced: How could we help patients and clinicians find a way towards empathy for each other, to make participating in health care more rewarding for both? Our first thought was, naturally, storytelling; but what kind of storytelling? Medicine is chock full of stories — from case studies to patient narratives and more. Structured abstracts can even be considered to tell research stories! None of these, however, are terribly accessible to the general public. The articles published in most life science publications tend to be exclusive, using language that is full of jargon, as well as figures that require not only an in-depth understanding of the data and context of that article, but also familiarity with statistics and research methods. Plain language abstracts help with understanding the most important points of the science, but tend to pull even further away from the stories behind the discoveries. Why Use Comics to Bui...
Source: Society for Participatory Medicine - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Newsletter bibliotherapy clinician education comics in education consumer health information doctor-patient relations communication Graphic medicine informed consent Patient Communication pictorial work Source Type: news