Narrative Medicine: The Use of History and Story in the Healing Process [Paperback]

Lewis Mehl-Madrona (Author), Thom Hartmann (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 22, 2007

Seeks to restore the pivotal role of the patient’s own story in the healing process

• Shows how conventional medicine tends to ignore the account of the patient

• Presents case histories where disease is addressed and healed through the narrative process

• Proposes a reinvention of medicine to include the indigenous healing methods that for thousands of years have drawn their effectiveness from telling and listening

Modern medicine, with its high-tech and managed-care approach, has eliminated much of what constitutes the art of healing: those elements of doctoring that go beyond the medications prescribed. The typically brief office visit leaves little time for doctors to listen to their patients, though it is in these narratives that disease is both revealed and perpetuated--and can be released and treated.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona’s Narrative Medicine examines the foundations of the indigenous use of story as a healing modality. Citing numerous case histories that demonstrate the profound power of narrative in healing, the author shows how when we learn to dialogue with disease, we come to understand the power of the “story” we tell about our illness and our possibilities for better health. He shows how this approach also includes examining our relationships to our extended community to find any underlying disharmony that may need healing. Mehl-Madrona points the way to a new model of medicine--a health care system that draws its effectiveness from listening to the healing wisdom of the past and also to the present-day voices of its patients.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Challenging the voice of conventional health care, Mehl-Medrona (Coyote Medicine) demonstrates the limits of modern medicine by looking to the perspectives and stories that have kept indigenous cultures (including his own Cherokee ancestors) healthy for centuries. A professor of family medicine and psychiatry, Mehl-Madrona avoids a "problem-based" vantage point, addressing root causes where conventional medicine addresses symptoms, using the body's natural tendency toward harmony and balance where others use drugs. Though it's not a new thesis, Mehl-Madrona illustrates it cleverly and accessibly ("Classical medicine stops at the frame of the body, ignoring the social world and... its multiple frames"). Mehl-Medrona invites readers into powerful tribal talking circles, as well as the sweatlodge, where patients conceptualize illness as an entity to battle. Case studies from North American and Hawaii natives demonstrate how stories themselves can spur healing: one troubled Hawaii youth was only able to identify his self-destructive behavior, and his need for help, after hearing a folk story about a boy with a man-eating shark mouth on his back. Though clearly pushing an agenda, Mehl-Madrona's arguments are compelling and level-headed, but occasionally lose momentum to excess exposition. This look at story and community's role in individual health convincingly advocates for a larger, more inclusive, more complete health care system.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"Lewis Mehl-Madrona is an extraordinarily gifted physician and healer. I saw him transform the lives of profoundly affected patients. Mostly, he was sitting next to them, listening carefully and telling them stories. I was amazed."
(David Servan-Schreiber, M.D., Ph.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, author of Instinct to Heal )

“Some people say that we are made of molecules and cells, but Lewis Mehl-Madrona insists that we are made of stories. Stories involve a whole person in a historical context and in a whole environment. This more expansive view of ourselves is more true-to-life and real. Dr. Mehl-Madrona teaches us to learn our own story and to use it to heal ourselves and to appreciate our own soul’s path.”
(Dana Ullman, MPH, author of The Homeopathic Revolution and coauthor of Everybody’s Guide to Homeopathic Medicines )

“Dr. Mehl-Madrona’s work with Narrative Medicine is both powerful and exciting. He meets each patient as a unique individual instead of a diagnosis. He provides story after story of successes that are not within the normal spectrum of modern medicine, and breaks down narrative medicine into components so we may catch a glimpse of how it achieves its success. He brings the reader back to listening and compassion, the two human aspects of medicine that are crucial to the doctor-patient relationship. His view of medicine and healing expands how one looks at the illness, health, and community.”
(Ann Marie Chiasson, M.D., MPH, CCFP, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of Arizona )

“It is clear from Lewis Mehl-Madrona’s work that healing is far too complex a process to entrust to the western medical profession. And in opening the door to indigenous voices from outside these professional doors, the present volume is both illuminating and invaluable. My hope is that this book will serve as a beacon and an inspiration for the broadest collaboration in defining and enriching our orientations to health, illness, and cure.”
(Kenneth J. Gergen, Mustin Professor of Psychology, Swarthmore College )

“Stanford Medical School trained Mehl-Madrona invokes the philosophy of his Cherokee and Lakota ancestors to remind us that the path to redemption for today’s health care world is to honor the patient’s life story with all of its elements of culture, community, family, health beliefs, spirituality, and individuality. Mehl-Madrona’s narrative contribution is possibly the most inclusive philosophy ever proposed in medicine. “After reading Narrative Medicine, when we come face-to-face with that terrible question, ‘Doc, how long have I got to live?’ we will know that the answer cannot be found in a statistic or the natural history of a disease, but depends upon your unique story--the one told up until this point and especially the one authored from this point onward.”
(Farrell Silverberg, Ph.D., author of Make the Leap: A Practical Guide to Breaking the Patterns That Hold You Back )

“Our stories bring us comfort and help us become acquainted with our unanticipated dreams and fears. Narrative Medicine helps us connect to this personal taproot enhancing our understanding of how we can find our way back to wellness in crisis.”
(Roberta Lee, Continuum Center for Health and Healing, Beth Israel Medical Center, New York )

"Addressing shamanism, quantum physics, critical theory, and more, this book will appeal to a wide variety of readers, including healing practitioners . . ."
(Blanche Angelo, Library Journal Xpress Reviews, July 2007 )

"The author writes very well, weaving examples throughout, as well as stories from a variety of cultures, showing how he uses stories in his practice with actual patients." (
D. Tigermoon, The Pagan Review, Nov 2007
)

"Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona presents us with a sincere and well-researched case for a new approach to mental and physical health. . . . as well as cutting-edge sociological developments in transformational studies." (
David Paulsen, New Age Retailer, Jan 2008
)

"It is quite refreshing to read the perspective of a health-care practitioner who can draw on his own cultural experience and articulate his interventions scientifically. Yet, at the same time he does not alienate the reader by romanticizing his uniqueness." (
PsycCritiques of the American Psychological Association, Mar 2008
)

"Dr. Mehl-Madrona treats each of his patients as a unique individual with a history and a story rather than simply a diagnosis. As well as listening with compassion, he offers a traditional story to help a patient gain insight into their illness and path to wellness. Most of the stories he shares come from North American Native culture as that is Dr. Mehl-Madrona's heritage." (
Ann Moore, Synergy Magazine, Vol. 6, Issue 2, Mar/Apr 2009 )

"What makes this Narrative Medicine important and exciting, at least to me, is that we have a board certified medical doctor challenging the more tradition modalities of Western medicine; not by ridiculing them, or even dismissing them, but rather offering narrative medicine as both a complement and a way to systemically treat the whole person. . . . shows us the importance of our own story in our own healing process. Throughout the book there are case histories which we can draw upon to both understand how the process works and to make personal application."
(Frank A. Mills, Co/Create Ideas Matter, March 2010 )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Bear & Company; 1 edition (June 22, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591430658
• ISBN-13: 978-1591430650
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #315,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

full bio: Lewis Mehl-Madrona Origins. Coming from indigenous origins, Lewis has been interested throughout his life in the contributions that his culture can make to mainstream society. He grew up on the Kentucky-Tennessee border in the United States, a rural area where, even today, 60% of families have household incomes less than $10,000 per year. What these people do have, however, is a culture rich in story and in healing traditions. When he entered Stanford University School of Medicine in California, in 1973, Lewis realized that his culture had much to offer mainstream society - through its understanding of the power of story and through its understanding of healing and transformation. Training. After graduation from medical school, Lewis completed training programs in family medicine and in psychiatry at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He is American Board Certified in these specialties (with added qualifications in geriatrics) and has taught at several U.S. medical schools, including the University of Arizona and the University of Pittsburgh. In July, 2005, he came to Canada, where is now Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine. He received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Psychological Studies Institute in Palo Alto in 1980 and a Master's of Philosophy in Narrative Practices from Massey University in 2007.Writing. Lewis is the author of four books. Coyote Medicine: Lessons from Native America (Firestone, New York, 1998) explores his efforts to integrate his aboriginal origins and culture into his medical practice. Coyote Healing: Miracles from Native America (Bear and Company, Rochester, VT, 2003) explores the unexpected healings that occur with traditional aboriginal healers and generates some principles for healing. Coyote Wisdom: The Healing Power of Story (Bear and Company, Rochester, VT, 2005), which tells about how narrative organizes experience and guides the healing process. Narrative Medicine: the use of story and history in the healing process (Bear and Company, Rochester, VT in press) is about how we can see the various systems of healing from diverse cultures around the world (including Western technological medicine) as stories which interface with the stories of the culture to which the healing is being applied. Lewis writes about the need to respect a diversity of stories (cultures) and to match the healing story with the patient's story - in fact, to elicit the patient's story of the illness to understand its creation and maintenance and to use that story to inspire a plausible path to healing. Goals: In all these endeavors, Lewis has brought forth an indigenous perspective to the mainstream world. Stories are associated with "health" or "disease." Lewis has worked with communities and companies using narrative perspectives, including Appreciative Inquiry, to draw forth their stories and to facilitate a collaborative re-authoring of those stories. These approaches have faith that people do know how to solve their own problems, that the stories exist, that local expertise is usually sufficient for solving problems, that outside experts rarely help, and that people need to be empowered to trust their local practices, abilities, and cultures to solve problems that present, whether in community relations (alcohol, drugs, poverty), health and disease, or business. Lewis actively pursues his relationship with indigenous culture - through research programs to treat diabetes with traditional medicines, through attending ceremonies, and through working with Northern Saskatchewan reserves to provide psychiatric services on regular trips to the 60th parallel (almost).

abbreviated bio:

Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, PhD, MPhil, is Director of the Psychopharmacology Program at Argosy University Hawai'i, where he is also Associate Professor of Psychology. He is an adjunct professor of anthropology at Johnson State College in Vermont and is Education Director for the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation, also in Vermont, USA. He is the author of Coyote Medicine, Coyote Healing, Coyote Wisdom, Narrative Medicine, and the soon to be released (July 2009), Narrative Psychiatry: healing mind and brain in a social world. Lewis is a graduate of Stanford University School of Medicine, the Psychological Studies Institute in Palo Alto, and Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. He is American board certified in family medicine and in psychiatry.

Medicine Wheel Oriented Bio:
Mehl-Madrona's story of searching for his ancestral roots beneath the forest of Christianization, colonization, and assimilation becomes a story of seeking mind, body, spirit, and community integration. The need for a parallel path to biomedicine became apparent in medical school when he learned from the professor of medicine and pharmacology that "life was a relentless progression toward death, disease, and decay. The physician's job is to slow the rate of decline." By the weekend, he had found a Cherokee healer with whom to study. That was 1973 and he hasn't stopped his studying with elders. He will describe the guidance they have given him toward achieving a balance among mind, body, spirit, and community, which represent the four directions of the medicine wheel.

My Address
Coyote Institute -- East, P.O. Box 9309, S. Burlington, VT 05407, USA

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not a "tool" like narrative therapy: this is a new way of seeing., April 6, 2008

By 

Nancy L. Howe "survivor and cancer researcher" (Scottsdale, AZ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Narrative Medicine: The Use of History and Story in the Healing Process (Paperback)

Narrative Medicine is a radical critique of conventional medicine in which Mehl-Madrona, M.D., Ph.D. challenges the knowledge system that physicians, especially psychiatrists, use to diagnose illness and direct treatment. Mehl-Madrona's writing style is straight-forward and concrete, enlivened with his skillful use of patient stories and historical examples drawn from his years in practice and as a professor of medicine, currently at University of Saskatchewan and before that, University of Arizona. He traces the philosophical roots of western medicine's fundamental axioms that disease can be understood with a mechanistic, biological model alone, and that valid medical solutions must generalize to a large population. Mehl-Madrona uses clinical experiences, recent research in physics, and advances in post-modern philosophy to underscore how these medical truths are, in themselves, a story. "Narrative therapy," as described by more than 200 Amazon authors, is promoted as an effective tool to be added to the physician's standard repertoire. Narrative medicine, by contrast, is not a tool; it is a way of seeing. In Mehl-Madrona's experience, storytelling is transformative, capable of promoting healing as a consequence of the interplay between teller and listeners.

As a cancer researcher, I found that Narrative Medicine held the key to understanding interviews I conducted with ovarian cancer survivors. I had asked these women to tell me how they learned of their diagnosis. What they told me were stories of how their illness had changed their self-understanding. For most, their interactions with the medical community had been frustrating and fragmented. They described being shuttled back and forth among a variety of experts (e.g., nephrologists, internists, and GI specialists), few of whom had the time or patience to listen when the women attempted to describe how their symptoms had unfolded. For all of them, the diagnostic process was frightening and disheartening.

My colleague found that Mehl-Madrona's analysis of bi-polar disorder and the current predominance of the biochemical explanation mirrored her experience. As a "non-responder" to standard medications, her hopes for relief had been undermined by the prevailing view that bi-polar disorder is a life-long biochemical imbalance for which drugs are the only effective treatment. "What I do now to help myself includes many of the approaches contained in the healing stories in Narrative Medicine," she told me. "Like Mehl-Madrona says, my solution is particular and works for me; other people in my support group find that their stories spur them to actions that are very different from mine, but equally helpful. Narrative Medicine gave me a new understanding of why that might be."

For a single text --- and a paperback at that! --- to accomplish both these tasks is testimony to the breadth of application available to the reader who is open to Narrative Medicine's premise.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not as good as "Coyote Medicine", July 27, 2009

By 

Stuart Dole (Santa Rosa, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Narrative Medicine: The Use of History and Story in the Healing Process (Paperback)

The overall tone of this book is plodding and academic, compared to Mehl-Madrona's "Coyote Medicine". Either he changed editors or didn't use one. Not much new material. But this may appeal more to academic types. I much preferred the dynamic personal narrative of the earlier book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A major contribution, September 3, 2009

By 

Olivier Clerc (France) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Narrative Medicine: The Use of History and Story in the Healing Process (Paperback)

This book goes way beyond giving us a new understanding of medicine and the power of story in healing. It provides us with incredible insight into this too often untapped (or unconsciously tapped) power to create stories out of what we live, what we perceive, to give meaning to our lives.
There are major parallels to draw between Dr Mehl-Madrona's books and Viktor Frankl's work, and his "logotherapy". Frankl helped his patients find meaning (logos) in their lives, and so does Lewis Mehl-MAdrona, but by using a different approach.
As compared to previous books, "Narrative Medicine" allows readers to have a much deeper understanding of the workings of this medicine. It gets to the very principles of the power of stories.
It is not always an easy book, but it is undoubtedly a major one, a reference book, to be read, re-read and considered : there is much to me learned from it !