Medical students’ knowledge about narrative based medicine: where we are and where we are going?

Abstract

The medical teaching is basically grounded in a medicine based on evidence, in which the patients are data, submitted to protocols. The narrative based medicine favors the patient’s history, their speech and the context in which their history is inserted. With its relatively recent implementation, it is necessary to know the knowledge of medical students on the subject. This is a cross-sectional study, analytical, that uses the qualitative method and content analysis design. Medical students from the third to the sixth semester included, in two stages: first with an online formulary with a question: "do you know what it is Narrative Based Medicine?", with a binary option of "yes" and "no". The second was a focus group with part of these students. There were 134 participants in the 1st stage, where 123 answered “no” and 11 answered “yes”. In the focus group, three categories emerged. 1. “Language” as the impossibility of detaching it from the patient's narrative. 2. “Empathy” with the need to establish a bond with the patient that would allow anamnesis in a natural way. 3. “Cake’s Recipe / Narrative” is the expression of the stiffness proposed by medical schools in a medical interview and of the students' attempts to remodel it to find greater naturalness in the doctor-patient relationship, fostering the importance of Narrative Medicine. The results of this study show that medical students at this private college have intuitive knowledge about narrative medicine, as it is interwoven with the principles of the institutional teaching program.