Loreen Herwaldt, MD, a professor of internal medicine and an infectious disease specialist at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, talks about her new book:
What kind of book is Patient Listening a Doctors Guide?
Patient Listening is a series of author/patient stories of getting health care. When you look at them they look like poems on the page so I called them found poems.
Where did the idea for this book come from?
The idea started when I read Mary Swander's book Out of this World. I got the idea to begin interviewing authors who had written about their experience of illness. I tried a writing exercise on the story one of the writers shared about her experience getting health care and I created my first found poem. After that, Mary Swander helped me with the idea of putting them together in a collection, or a performance piece, and that's where the idea for the book came from.
How did you go about the process of gathering and editing the stories down and creating found poems?
I would read through the transcripts. I would find a story that someone told me about getting health care and literally cut and paste it in my computer. Then I would begin taking out words that weren't necessary—concentrating it down. Then I would arrange what was left like a poem. What you have is the essence, the real emotional impact, of the story.
How many years has this project been in the process?
More than 10 years—so for quite a while.
Who is the intended reader for Patient Listening?
I hope everyone will enjoy it and benefit from it. I hope that health care providers, students in health care professions, will read it and appreciate the importance of the patient's story and the patient's point of view, and how different the patient's point of view often is than our point of view as health care providers. I hope the general public will read it and appreciate that someone else has experienced similar things as they have and realize that their stories are important.
Do you have a favorite page or poem from the book you could share with us?
I'll read a poem from Jane Smiley. It's called Whose Illness Is It Anyway? And I think this poem illustrates the difference between the health care worker's perspective and the patient's perspective and it goes this way:
Whose Illness Is It Anyway?
First, let me say that
healing is kind of organic and
fixing is kind of mechanical.
The surgeon was of the fixing mode.
That was just fine
for this particular issue.
My orthopedist
had a kind of breezy, arrogant manner, and
he was young,
probably only about 35.
He was always telling me what a great
job he did
putting my leg together,
you know, and having me acknowledge
that he was a great surgeon.
I didn't want to focus on what a great job
he did or
the extent of the injury or whatever.
I thought he was into the surgery
as his personal experience (laughing)
rather than mine.
And I just thought that was
sort of inappropriate.
I think there is always a disparity between
how the patient feels and
the way the doctor feels
about something that is going on.
If someone wanted to purchase the book, Patient Listening, A Doctor's Guide how would they go about doing that?
It's available in several of the local bookstores and it's available online.
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