“I’m writing my story so that others might see fragments of themselves.” – Author Lena Waithe
Writing a story about your experiences is a bit like looking into the mirror, says Dr Asad Mian, a published author and an associate professor in emergency medicine at AKU.
“There’s something very revealing about the process,” says Dr Asad. “Not only do you see yourself anew but your readers also gain a new perspective as they reflect on your experiences. They go on the same immersive
journey as you do, and the process often changes them and those around them.”
Dr Asad Mian believes in the power of storytelling as a tool to help doctors reflect upon their experiences and become better, more empathetic professionals. After the recent publication of his first book of short stories, An Itinerant Observer, Dr Asad shared his thoughts on how a form of storytelling, narrative medicine, can be personally and professionally beneficial for anyone pursuing the ‘noble occupation’ of medicine.
When did you start writing stories?
I have been writing for over eight years now and it started as a way to declutter my mind. Writing would help me process my thoughts, work through challenges I was facing at the workplace and enable me to reflect on meaningful events around me.
When I started to share my short stories with my close colleagues, it turned out to be helpful for them as well. Many of them had gone through similar events in the workplace and so storytelling helped them validate their own experiences and challenges.
What does storytelling or narrative medicine mean to you?
The odd thing is that I had been writing about my experiences as a doctor for a long time before I ever heard of the field of narrative medicine! For years, I was unknowingly pushing myself and encouraging others to tell stories.
When I stumbled across narrative medicine, I realised that there was a much larger field that was all about encouraging people – both patients and practitioners – to tell stories that would facilitate the more humane and effective practice of medicine.
Narrative medicine focuses on the personal connections between patient and physician. It revolves around topics such as patient experiences, the meaning of medical practice for the physician, physicians’ collective profession of their ideals and medicine’s discourse with the society it serves.
By encouraging reflection on medicine’s big questions, narrative medicine offers physicians the means to grow as individuals and practitioners while making them more keenly aware of their impact on those around them.
It encourages empathy with patients, mindfulness about one’s personal choices and compassion for those who are healing or recovering from challenges.
Narrative medicine also addresses a pet peeve of mine which is the prevailing emphasis on data and evidence above all else. While science is important, the danger is that we treat each patient as a statistic. Narrative medicine invites you to explore how every story is valuable and reminds you of the healthcare profession’s ethic of service to those in need. This often gets lost in the drive to quantify the impact of everything we do in the field.
Can you share a few examples of how narrative medicine approaches have made an impact?
On a very basic level, narrative medicine has a therapeutic effect on readers who happen to have experienced the same event. For example, I remember blogging about how dementia was affecting my father’s life. After reading the piece, so many people with elderly relatives – or a parent suffering from the disease – came up to me saying that they felt relieved to hear that they weren’t alone in their struggle. I heard so many accounts of how people understood their elder relatives better and how they were changing their caregiving practices for the better.
Another instance is when storytelling sheds a light on an unknown or underappreciated aspect of medicine. For example, there is a tendency to think of doctors as uncaring. But a senior professional recently wrote an account of the struggle of breaking bad news to terminally ill patients and how he was concerned that sharing the diagnosis could risk harming the patient’s remaining quality of life. Such personal reflections allow other doctors to recognise and understand the challenges they’ll face on their own professional journeys and reminds them of their duties as professionals.
I also know of a few doctors who have experienced personal tragedies such as the deaths of loved ones to preventable causes of death. For one doctor, the process of reflecting on his loss changed him and led to him launching initiatives to spread awareness of the importance of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. This doctor is now passionate about addressing failings in our healthcare system such as the low survival rate from cardiac arrests that take place at home. Another colleague of mine was forever changed by witnessing a child from interior Sindh lose his life because of the lack of ambulances in the province’s rural areas. He then went on to work on expanding access to emergency medical services at a private ambulance network in Karachi.
Finally, narrative medicine approaches have helped some of my colleagues achieve a lifelong dream of seeing their name published in medical journals and thereby contributing to the discourse on medicine’s big questions.
What are your future plans?
I’m currently encouraging other students to take up narrative medicine through my association with AKU’s
Critical Creative Innovative Thinking Forum, CCIT. CCIT encourages unconventional approaches to biomedicine and healthcare and narrative medicine is one of the key tools through which we inspire the current generation of healthcare professionals to assess how they can innovate to make an impact.
Besides running workshops on narrative medicine, we have also incorporated storytelling into the curriculum of our fellowship which seeks to train young professionals in the process of innovation. We are currently offering a virtual course through which participants can critically review narrative essays or blogs prior to writing their own. Most recently, we have also started talking to a digital storytelling company to scale narrative medicine across and beyond AKU.
CCIT also runs a
blog and we continue to encourage members of the profession to contribute their insights, which we then publicise through our platforms.
Tell us more about your book and your future writing plans.
An Itinerant Observer is based on my experiences of living in Karachi and Houston and my travels to other cities around the world. It is a collection of diverse narratives that have been re-edited and updated into a book of short stories for older children, young adults, and adults. It spans a range of topics and I invite everyone to explore the stories in them. At the core, my book is really about my fellow travellers, several of whom I encountered in the world of medicine. Using a narrative medicine-based reflective writing approach, I have tried to pay tribute to patients and their families, without whom I would not have felt the inspiration for these stories.
However, if, and when you read the stories, you shall realise that not all fellow travellers in my book are humans, there are stories about animals too! And not all stories are serious; in fact, very few are! I take great pride in utilising humor as a teaching/learning tool for both serious and non-serious narratives.
In the final analysis, perhaps I am merely an itinerant observer of the multiple ways in which love extraordinarily manifests itself in our ordinary lives; and if so, then it has truly been an honour to bear witness to that through writing.
My published book likely contains just under half of my stories. I intend on compiling the rest of them, saved in various folders all over the place, into a sequel. Most of those unpublished stories are from a different time from the first set, hence I would like to believe that the latter have been written in a more nuanced manner. Maybe part two of An Itinerant Observer shall be even more of a hit than the inaugural version?!
Find out more about An Itinerant Observer
here.