Narrative matter essay, Narrative Matters Essays Honored

Drawn from the popular "Narrative Matters" column in the journal Health Affairs, the essays epitomize the policy narrative, a new genre of writing that explores health policy through the expression of personal experiences. Forty-six articles focus on such topics as the hard financial realities of medical insurance, AIDS, assisted suicide, marketing drugs, genetic engineering, organ transplants, and ethnic and racial disparities in the health care system. The narratives raise ethical and moral issues that are being studied in many of our nation's medical schools. Narrative matter essay

Narrative Matters

Health care decision making affects patients and families first and foremost, yet their perspectives are not always factored into health policy deliberations and buy an essay discussions. In this anthology, Jessica Bylander brings together the personal stories of the patients, physicians, caregivers, policy makers, and others whose writings add much-needed human context to health care decision making.

Drawn from the popular "Narrative Matters" column in the journal Health Affairs, these essays embody a vision for a health care system that centers the humanity of patients and doctors alike.

Health care decision making affects patients and families first and foremost, yet their perspectives are not always factored into health policy deliberations and discussions. In this anthology, Jessica Bylander brings together the personal stories of the patients, physicians, caregivers, policy makers, and others whose writings add much-needed human context to health care decision making.

Drawn from the popular "Narrative Matters" column in the leading health policy journal Health Affairs, this collection features essays by some of the leading minds in health care today, including Pulitzer Prize–winner Siddhartha Mukherjee, MacArthur fellow Diane Meier, former Planned Parenthood president Leana S. Wen, and former secretary of health and human services Louis W. Sullivan. The collection also presents important stories from lesser-known voices, including a transgender doctor in Oklahoma who calls for better treatment of trans patients and a palliative care physician who reflects on how perspectives on hastening death have changed in recent years. A foreword written by National Humanities Medal recipient Abraham Verghese, MD, further rounds out the book.

The collection of thirty-two essays is organized around several themes:

• the practice of medicine

• medical innovation and research

• patient-centered care

• the doctor-patient relationship

• disparities and discrimination

• aging and end-of-life care

• maternity and childbirth

• opioids and substance abuse

Contributors: Louise Aronson, Laura Arrowsmith, Cheryl Bettigole, Cindy Brach, Gary Epstein-Lubow, Jonathan Friedlaender, Patricia Gabow, Katti Gray, Yasmin Sokkar Harker, Timothy Hoff, Carla Keirns, Raya Elfadel Kheirbek, Katy B. Kozhimannil, Pooja Lagisetty, Maria Maldonado, Maureen A. Mavrinac, Diane E. Meier, Dina Keller Moss, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Donna Jackson Nakazawa, Travis N. Rieder, Aroonsiri Sangarlangkarn, Elaine Schattner, Janice Lynch Schuster, Myrick C. Shinall, Gayathri Subramanian, Louis W. Sullivan, Gautham K. Suresh, Abraham Verghese, Otis Warren, Leana S. Wen, Charlotte Yeh

edited by Jessica Bylander, Senior Editor, Health Affairs

foreword by Abraham Verghese, MD

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Reviews

This compilation is unique. because of its strong relevance to today's health policy. These narratives matter.

Very helpful. An essential library volume.

— Journal of Immigrant Minority Health

This volume is relevant to researchers, clinicians, and health care policy makers, and I recommend it highly.

— American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy

To begin to understand the many challenges facing the US health care system, you could spend years in the shadow of doctors, patients, medical students, and legislators. Or you could just read this book. Narrative Matters opens a window into what's happening in American medicine through the minds and pens of those in the middle of it all. At times insightful, depressing, uplifting, and direct, Narrative Matters accomplishes a rare feat—a book as well-written as it is necessary.

— Joshua M. Sharfstein, MD, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, author of The Public Health Crisis Survival Guide: Leadership and Management in Trying Times

Narrative Matters showcases some of health care's most stunning writing. The stories are moving, eloquent, and often unforgettable.

— Atul Gawande, MD, Brigham and Women's Hospital, author of Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

For any reader enthralled by the literature of medicine, these fascinating, compelling, and beautifully written doctor stories were written expressly for you.

— Howard Markel, MD, PhD, The University of Michigan Medical School, author of When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America and the Fears They Have Unleashed

Narrative does matter. That's why these writers are so successful in making the reader feel and respond to their frustration, anger, pain, sadness, confusion, joy, or buy an essay online loving kindness by writing personal narratives of health care. Had they addressed us on a purely intellectual level, we might have developed a clearer idea about how to create a more equitable health care system, but we'd have less motivation, less passion, for the task. Narrative Matters is a splendid achievement. This wonderful collection will make a big difference in the way the reader thinks about many of the important issues facing health care today. I suspect this book will do a great deal to enhance public awareness of the human stories at the center of our US health care system.

— Jack Coulehan, MD, MPH, Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics, State University of New York at Stony Brook, coeditor of Primary Care: More Poems by Physicians

A doctor kneels on a highway and watches a child die from a completely preventable accident, as the boy's father wails, 'Wake up, my son!' A baby dies because of language barriers and bureaucracy in the clinic. A nurse quits in despair, stopped by the system from doing the right thing. A governor makes a wrenching choice between a world-class transplant program and basic care for 600,000 people. If these true stories of needless tragedy don't convince you our health care system is broken, you must have a heart of stone.

— Melvin J. Konner, PhD, MD, Emory University, author of Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School

Narrative Matters shows how health care policies affect real people. Policy loves charts and statistics. These stories fill in the conflicts, the emotions, the frequent pain and occasional joys of being somewhere on one of those charts. Numbers make no moral demands on us; only faces require a response. In these stories, we see the faces that health care policy is all about.

— Arthur W. Frank, PhD, University of Calgary, author of The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics

Book Details

Foreword, by Abraham Verghese, MD

List of Contributors

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Practice of Medicine

The Importance of Being

Abraham Verghese

Rethinking the Traditional Doctor's Visit

Maureen A

Foreword, by Abraham Verghese, MD

List of Contributors

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Practice of Medicine

The Importance of Being

Abraham Verghese

Rethinking the Traditional Doctor's Visit

Maureen A. Mavrinac

In the Safety Net: A Tale of Ticking Clocks and Tricky Diagnoses

Maria Maldonado

The Personal Toll of Practicing Medicine

Elaine Schattner

Chapter 2. Medical Innovation and Research

Cancer, Our Genes, and the Anxiety of Risk-Based Medicine

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Beating a Cancer Death Sentence

Jonathan Friedlaender

A Black Alzheimer's Patient Wants to Be Part of the Cure

Katti Gray

Chapter 3. Patient-Centered Care

"Nothing Is Broken": For an Injured Doctor, Quality-Focused Care Misses the Mark

Charlotte Yeh

The Battle of the Bundle: Lessons from My Mother's Partial Hip Replacement

Timothy Hoff

Even in an Emergency, Doctors Must Make Informed Consent an Informed Choice

Cindy Brach

Chapter 4. The Doctor-Patient Relationship

How to Win the Doctor Lottery

Donna Jackson Nakazawa

At the VA, Healing the Doctor-Patient Relationship

Raya Elfadel Kheirbek

When Patients Mentor Doctors: The Story of One Vital Bond

Aroonsiri Sangarlangkarn

Chapter 5. Disparities and Discrimination

"Go Back to California": When Providers Fail Transgender Patients

Laura Arrowsmith

A Simple Case of Chest Pain: Sensitizing Doctors to Patients with Disabilities

Leana S. Wen

Grasping at the Moon: Enhancing Access to Careers in the Health Professions

Louis W. Sullivan

Bridging the Divide between Dental and Medical Care

Gayathri Subramanian

In Rural Towns, Immigrant Doctors Fill a Critical Need

Yasmin Sokkar Harker

An Uninsured Immigrant Delays Needed Care

Cheryl Bettigole

Chapter 6. Aging and End-of-Life Care

"I Don't Want Jenny to Think I'm Abandoning Her": Views on Overtreatment

Diane E. Meier

The Fall: Aligning the Best Care with Standards of Care at the End of Life

Patricia Gabow

Getting It Right at the End of Life

Dina Keller Moss

The Evolving Moral Landscape of Palliative Care

Myrick C. Shinall

Necessary Steps: How Health Care Fails Older Patients, and How It Can Be Done Better

Louise Aronson

A Family Disease: Witnessing Firsthand the Toll that Dementia Takes on Caregivers

Gary Epstein-Lubow

Chapter 7. Maternity and Childbirth

Watching the Clock: A Mother's Hope for a Natural Birth in a Cesarean Culture

Carla Keirns

In the "Gray Zone," a Doctor Faces Tough Decisions on Infant Resuscitation

Gautham K. Suresh

Reversing the Rise in Maternal Mortality

Katy B. Kozhimannil

Chapter 8. Opioids and Substance Abuse

Down the Rabbit Hole: A Chronic Pain Sufferer Navigates the Maze of Opioid Use

Janice Lynch Schuster

In Opioid Withdrawal, with No Help in Sight

Travis N. Rieder

The Fine Line between Doctoring and Dealing

Pooja Lagisetty

Intoxicated, Homeless, and in Need of a Place to Land

Otis Warren

Narrative Matters Essays Honored

Narrative Matters, the personal essay section of Health Affairs, publishes firsthand stories that explore the personal, ethical, and moral issues of delivering or receiving health care—and that carry a health policy message within them. The essays are popular with the journal’s readers (many say that Narrative Matters is what they turn to first), and they receive a tremendous number of hits and downloads on the Health Affairs Web site. Happily, during the past several years, an increasing number of media outlets and readers have discovered this compelling, affecting, literary nonfiction being published in Health Affairs.

Now, in fall 2009, Narrative Matters authors and essays from 2008 have been honored in two national "best-of" publications. The Best American Medical Writing 2009 is the first in a new series from Kaplan Publishing featuring "the genre’s finest authors." The inaugural edition, consisting of 23 essays, was edited by liver transplant surgeon and author Pauline Chen (herself a Narrative Matters author). Best American Medical Writing 2009 features pieces from the New Yorker, Newsweek, Harper’s, the New York Times, and two Narrative Matters pieces from Health Affairs. One, a split-voice narrative by Julie R. Rosenbaum, titled "Duality," describes the exhausting life of an academic physician and parent, in the process raising questions about workplace policies. The other, an essay by Alok A. Khorana, titled "Disorientation," is about an immigrant doctor, newly arrived from India, who discovers how it’s the little things that can be surprising.

The Best American Essays 2009, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, as in every previous year, includes a listing of "Notable Essays." This venerable publication, which has been a staple in bookstores and nonfiction writing courses since 1986, invites a different guest editor to select a group of best essays each year (for the 2009 edition the editor was Mary Oliver), with the series editor, Robert Atwan, selecting a prestigious list of notable essays written in all fields and from across the United States. This year, his "Notable Essays of 2008" included a Narrative Matters essay by physician/professor Anjali Jain. Titled "Crossing the Atlantic," the piece details how Jain, an American pediatrician living in England, found that her special-needs child wasn’t well diagnosed or cared for by the National Health Service. Eventually, she and her husband made a choice and found a solution—a very American one.

Three different voices, three different stories, all compellingly and beautifully told--and first appearing in the Narrative Matters section of Health Affairs in 2008. If you missed them then, we’re glad that these publishing accolades give us the chance to introduce them to you now in 2009.

Narrative matter essay, Narrative matter essay