Medicine Needs Storytellers, Not Just Doctors
When people think of doctors, they often picture white coats, stethoscopes, and prescriptions. They imagine us diagnosing diseases, checking reports, and hurrying through crowded hospital corridors. What they don’t usually imagine is a doctor sitting with a patient and telling a story. Yet storytelling is something medicine needs more than we realize.
Medical language is precise but it can also be distant. In medical school we learn to use terms like “upper respiratory tract infection” or “idiopathic cause.” These phrases are accurate, but for the patient listening, they can feel alien. Imagine being told, “you have a common chest infection, and we’ll help you recover.” Suddenly the same information feels lighter and less frightening. That shift happens when science is spoken as a story.
Storytelling does not dilute medicine, it makes it human. Patients may not remember their exact lab values, but they remember the images and metaphors we give them. When you tell a diabetic patient that too much sugar in the blood is like a traffic jam inside their vessels, the picture stays in their mind. When you explain a migraine as a storm inside the brain, they understand their pain better. Stories stay with people longer than numbers.
Doctors are not only experts in science, they are also translators. A prescription can tell someone what to do, but a story tells them why they should do it. Often it is the why that helps patients follow through with treatment.
Stories can heal in ways medicine alone cannot. Listening to a cancer survivor share their journey gives hope to someone newly diagnosed. Hearing a doctor explain an illness in simple words can reduce fear in ways that tablets never will. Narratives create trust, and trust itself is therapeutic. Patients give us their stories every day through case histories. When we listen closely and respond in a language that feels real, we build a connection that is as important as the diagnosis.
In medical school we are trained in anatomy, pharmacology, pathology and countless other subjects. What we are rarely taught is how to tell a story back to a patient. How to explain illness in a way that feels human. Writing for my blog HealthExplained.in is one way I try to practice this skill. Each article is an attempt to take something complicated and retell it so that it feels less intimidating and more relatable.
This is a skill every doctor can cultivate. Instead of saying “iron deficiency anemia is common in young women,” you can say “anemia feels like running a marathon without enough fuel, your body simply cannot carry oxygen the way it should and that is why you feel so tired.” That picture is remembered far longer than the phrase “low hemoglobin.”
Even as technology reshapes medicine with artificial intelligence, robotics, and predictive algorithms, this part of medicine will always belong to people. Machines may calculate, but they cannot comfort. Programs may predict, but they cannot give meaning.
That is why medicine will always need storytellers. At its heart medicine is not only about curing, it is about caring. And caring lives in the stories we tell and the stories we listen to.