Stories We Tell Each Other to Heal: Ricky Leiter, Alexis Drutchas, & Emily Silverman

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GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast 48 min 2 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 9 hours ago

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What is the opening introduction and who are the guests on this episode?

Eric Widera 0:00

Welcome to the Jerry Powell podcast. I forgot what I say next, Alex. It's only

Alex Smith 0:06

introduced your name. My name is Eric

Eric Widera 0:08

Rodera. I'm a little bit nervous. I'm sharing a story to ya.

Alex Smith 0:12

I'm Alex Smith and W uh uh usually you ask me who we have. We're gonna do it a little different. Alex with us today. Throwing us to start. All right. First, we're welcoming back Ricky Leeder, who's a palliative care doc at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and is co-founder of the Palliative Story Exchange. Ricky, welcome back to the Jerry Powell podcast. Great to be back. Thanks for having me. We're delighted to welcome Alexis Drutches, who is a palliative care doc at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Hospital and Harvard Medical School and co founder also of the Palliative Story Exchange. Alexis, welcome to JerryPal.

0:53

Thanks. Excited to be here.

Alex Smith 0:55

And we're delighted to welcome Emily Silverman, who is assistant professor of medicine at UCSF and creator and host of the Nocturnist live show and podcast. Emily, welcome to JerryPal.

Eric Widera 1:06

Thanks for having me. So I'm excited. Obviously I'm excited. I forget what I'm actually doing in this podcast. So we're gonna be talking about story exchanges to reconnect with medicine. But before we jump into that topic, we always start off with song request. Ricky, do you have the song?

Ricky Leiter 1:22

I do. Uh I would love to hear a head by a century by the tragically hip.

Eric Widera 1:27

Why did you pick this song, Ricky?

Ricky Leiter 1:29

Well, as someone born in Canada, I feel like obligated to pick something by the Tragically Hip, sort of the music of my childhood. It was my first concert without my parents. And actually this song was the uh last song they played live ever after you know, before their uh lead singer Gord Downey unfortunately died of a G BM. So has a special resonance for I think a lot of people who are Tragically Hip fans.

Alex Smith 1:53

Mm. And you've been requesting, I think, the c tragically hip previously, but we got denied. So this does Alex have

Eric Widera 2:02

an anti

Ricky Leiter 2:02

Canadian bias. What? I will just say the Canadi the Canadian listeners of Jerry Powell will very much appreciate this

Alex Smith 2:09

book. I'm married to a Canadian.

Ricky Leiter 2:11

Oh, okay. So he was

Alex Smith 2:12

born in Montreal. All right, here we go.

Unknown 2:16

First we climb a tree and maybe then we talk or sit silently and listen to our thoughts through illusions of some day casting a golden light no dress rehearsal. This is our life.

Unknown 2:52

That's where the hornet stung me. And I had a feverish drink. Revenge and die. Tonight we smoke their You are ahead by a sentry. You are ahead by sentry. You are ahead by a sentry.

Eric Widera 3:23

Thank you, Alex. All right. I'm gonna start us off with one of my few questions on here, because we're gonna get to exchanging stories too. Is Medicine is an evidence based discipline. We like data, we like science. Give me number needed treats, gimme the relative risk reduction. That's medicine and and stories are anecdotes. It's not science, it's not data. What's the value of stories in medicine? I'm gonna turn to Emily to start us off on that one.

Emily Silverman 3:59

Medicine is both a science and an art. We definitely draw on the sciences, on biomedical science, on clinical trials, on pharmaceutical design and all sorts of things like that. But at the end of the day, I actually view medicine more as an applied science. So we take that science and we apply it to something that's very messy and chaotic, like a human being or a community. or a population. So I think uh just as much as we focus on the science and the evidence, it's uh important to think about the art of how we apply that to people and the relationships and uh all of the great fun stuff, the stories uh that unfold in the exam room alongside the science itself.

Eric Widera 4:44

Yeah. And I gotta ask Emily, is that um is that why you started Nocturnist? And I encourage all of our listeners to to listen to the Nocturnist. Um you've been doing it for a while too, right?

Emily Silverman 4:57

Yeah, it's been about eight years. I've been running a medical storytelling program called The Nocturnist, and it was born when I was a medical resident at UCSF internal medicine. And I had always dreamed about being a doctor from the time I was a little kid and started to hit a wall, started to feel burned out, started to notice that I was spending a lot of time sitting at a computer screen and not as much time as I had hoped, uh, sitting with my patients and getting to know them.

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Chapters

8 chapters

1 What is the opening introduction and who are the guests on this episode? 0:00–5:29 2 Why does Ricky choose a Tragically Hip song and what does it reveal about his background? 5:29–13:54 3 How do the hosts define the value of stories in medicine compared to data? 13:54–21:07 4 What inspired Emily to create the Nocturnist live show and podcast? 21:07–25:54 5 How did the Palliative Story Exchange originate and evolve during COVID? 25:54–32:00 6 What is the process for developing and coaching stories for these initiatives? 32:00–38:38 7 How does Alex’s story about her mother illustrate the impact of palliative care? 38:38–44:22 8 What are the final reflections on storytelling, gratitude, and future directions? 44:22–48:33

Speakers

2 identified

Eric Widera 5 min Alex Smith 5 min

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Topics in this episode

San Francisco 1 Alex 2 Alex Smith 2 UCSF 2 Harvard Medical School 1 Jerry Powell podcast 1 Ed Martin 1 Massachusetts General Hospital 1 Elizabeth Chung 1 Harry Hahn 1 Susan Nelson 1 James Tulski 1

Source

Recorded05 Dec 2024

Publisherrss.libsyn.com ↗

Transcriptspeaker-named · 100+ languages

Handlerec:20524528

Show notes

We've covered stories before. With Liz Salmi, Anne Kelly, and Preeti Malani we talked about stories written up in the academic literature, such as the JAMA Piece of My Mind series. We talked with Thor Ringler, who helped found the My Life My Story Project at the VA and beyond, and Heather Coats about the evidence base for capturing patient stories. Today's podcast is both similar and different. Similar in that the underlying theme of the power of stories. Different in that these storytelling initiatives, the Nocturnists and the Palliative Story Exchange, are focused on clinicians sharing stories with each other in small groups to heal. There's something magical that happens in small group storytelling. It's that mixture of intimacy and vulnerability, of shared clinical experiences, that fosters a sense of belonging. We model that small group storytelling experience today. We discuss: The "origin stories" of the Nocturnists Live Show and Podcast and the Palliative Story Exchange The process for story creation and development, written in advance or not, feedback or not after the story, and the aims and goals of each initiative And we each tell a short story, modeling the process for The Nocturnists and the Palliative Story Exchange for our listeners These initiatives arose organically from clinicians as part of a journey away from burnout, moral distress, shame, and loneliness toward healing, wholeness, gratitude, and belonging. A journey taken one story at a time. One final note on the song request: About 20 years ago I took an epidemiology course as part of a Masters program. The instructor, Fran Cook, gave all the students a survey without explanation. We answered the survey and handed it in. One of the questions was, "Can you name a song by the Tragically Hip?" It later turned out the survey was a prognostic index designed to determine if the respondent was Canadian. -@AlexSmithMD Here's a link to an article about the Palliative Story Exchange.

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