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Rita Charon Quotes
born 1949 United States
Rita Charon (born in 1949) is an American physician with a doctorate in English literature who established the field of Narrative Medicine which refers to the training in interpreting literature and then applying that skill to understanding the accounts which patients tell.
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Our task as doctors, nurses, therapists, and ethicists is to learn each patient's personal language in its tenses, its images, its silences, and its tensions.
What needs to be contested in medicine is seldom the accuracy of observations but the restriction of interest--- the frame drawn so tightly--- to the biological.
This isn't just about being a nice doctor or having a nice bedside manner. It's hearing and taking responsibility for improving access and equity, because it's in our power to do this.
Radical listening is the effort to be present, to bear witness, and to listen without your biases and assumptions. It's about curiosity, not judgment.
I first used the phrase "narrative medicine" in [the year] 2000 to refer to clinical practice fortified by narrative competence-- the capacity to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret and be moved by the stories of illness.
When doctors write, they too experience the discovery of learning what they know. It continues to astonish me that writing is an avenue to the "unthought known"-- that is, the part of knowledge that sits under awareness.
I think my duty is to promote two things in my students: creativity and doubt....The creative person is able to venture into the unknown....And to tolerate doubt both requires and generates creativity. It's when you're out there, off the shore of the known, that you have to create.
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