From clinic to the OR, storytelling quietly shapes every decision in clinical care. This episode of BackTable ENT & Allergy examines how narrative medicine and the stories at the heart of each patient encounter can elevate your clinical practice, enhance empathy, and deepen the doctor-patient relationship. Pediatric ENT Dr. Gopi Shah interviews Dr. Alessandra (Alessa) Colaianni, a head and neck surgical oncologist at the University of North Carolina, about the power and relevance of narrative medicine in modern surgical care.
Timestamps
Resources
- Dr.Colaianni’s published work
- Columbia University Division of Narrative Medicine
- Columbia University Narrative Medicine Youtube channel
- The Nocturnists podcast
- Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealey
- The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jameson
- The Collected Schizophrenias Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang
- My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story by Abraham Verghese
More about this episode
Dr. Colaianni is a published writer whose work has been featured in the New York Times, New Yorker, and the New England Journal of Medicine. She describes her lifelong interest in writing and shares how earning a master’s degree in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge during medical school helped her reconnect with the humanistic side of medicine. She reframes narrative medicine not as an extra task, but as an approach already woven into daily clinical work through history-taking, listening, and documentation. The conversation explores the influence of patient identity, socioeconomic context, and the “characters” in each patient’s story on clinical decisions and care. Dr. Colaianni reflects on the role of storytelling in surgical training, the apprenticeship model, and how thoughtful boundaries can foster meaningful doctor-patient relationships. The episode concludes with a discussion of AI’s potential impact on empathy and recommended reading for further exploration of narrative medicine.