The Sydcast is all about intimate and informative conversations with fascinating people you may not know. Until now. Because everyone has a story.
Listen in as Syd talks to entrepreneurs, community leaders, professional athletes, politicians, academics, authors, musicians, and many more about who they are and how they got there.
Sydney Finkelstein is an award winning professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and a best-selling author of Superbosses and 25 other books. He’s written for the Harvard Business Review, the BBC, Fortune, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and more academic journals than you’d care to know about. He spends his time asking questions, and sometimes, even answering them.
Episode Summary
Have you heard about "narrative medicine?" On this episode of The Sydcast, Syd talks with Dr. Rita Charon about how the blending of the art of humanity and the science of medicine created a new method for doctors to better treat their patients. It also turns out that the ideas of narrative medicine can be applied in many other contexts beyond medicine, including business, sports, entrepreneurship, parenting, and our lives in the age of COVID. Narrative medicine is tapping into something deep and fundamental in each of us as human beings - our personal stories and what they mean, and reveal. Insights that help bring us meaning, something we need today in a world under siege on multiple fronts.
Syd Finkelstein
Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Masters degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.
Dr. Rita Charon
Rita Charon is a general internist and literary scholar who originated the field of narrative medicine in 2000. She is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and Professor of Medicine at Columbia University. She completed the MD at Harvard in 1978 and the PhD in English at Columbia in 1999, concentrating on the works of Henry James. Her research focuses on the consequences of narrative medicine practice, reflective clinical practice, and health care team effectiveness. At Columbia, she directs the Foundations of Clinical Practice faculty seminar, the Virginia Apgar Academy for Medical Educators, the Narrative and Social Medicine Scholarly Projects Concentration Track, the required Narrative Medicine curriculum for the medical school, and Columbia Commons: Collaborating Across Professions, a medical-center-wide partnership devoted to health care team effectiveness.
Dr. Charon inaugurated and teaches in the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine graduate program at Columbia. She has lectured and served as Visiting Professor at many medical schools and universities in the US and abroad, teaching narrative medicine theory and practice. She has received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and research funding from the NIH, the NEH, the American Board of Internal Medicine, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, and several additional private foundations. She was chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the 2018 Jefferson Lecture, “the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.” Dr. Charon has published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, Narrative, Henry James Review, Poetics Today, Partial Answers, and Literature and Medicine. She is the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford University Press, 2006) and co-author of Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is co-editor of Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics (Routledge, 2002) and Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine (SUNY Press, 2008). She is working on a book on the nature of narrative knowledge and why and how stories work.
Insights from this episode:
- Details on the theory of narrative medicine, its creation, and how this new field of medicine is changing the doctor/patient relationship.
- Differences between narrative medicine and traditional medicine practices.
- Benefits of narrative medicine including a decrease in emotional exhaustion among doctors.
- Strategies other professions are employing to integrate narrative practice into their fields.
- Reasons why narrative methods are especially important during COVID-19.
- Benefits of bringing creativity into traditionally non-creative fields and renewing focus on the arts and humanities.
Quotes from the show:
- On the effect of narrative medicine on doctor/patient relationship: “It became a way to make our account be really a joint account of who’s hearing, who’s listening, and we both have to be there.” – Rita Charon
- “As you describe it, it sounds almost like a narrative equivalent to the science of medicine.” – Syd Finkelstein
- “It’s not a matter of, you’re a warm person, you’re a cold person, but let’s make sure you have the experience of authentic conversation.” – Rita Charon
- On the benefits of having a teacher: “For creativity, I don’t think we’re going to become a Picasso overnight, but we can try if we want to and, ideally, if there’s someone who can help you do that.” – Syd Finkelstein
- “It has really developed into questions as much about social justice as about anything else and what is it that people deserve when they’re ill and come to their physician.” – Rita Charon
- “The machine of practice today is really quite relentless.” – Rita Charon
- “There was a bedrock of interest in why aren’t the humanities and the arts better integrated into healthcare.” – Rita Charon
- “It’s like inductive versus deductive research.” – Syd Finkelstein
- On creativity expanding into traditionally non-creative fields: “People interacting together, around creativity, which is so rare in life unless you’re in the creative fields as your career, I think that there must be a real longing for people to engage in this.” – Syd Finkelstein
- “It was the psychoanalysts that really struck me some time ago by saying what psychoanalysis is for is freedom, and I think what art is for is freedom.” – Rita Charon
Stay Connected:
Syd Finkelstein
Website: http://thesydcast.com
LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein
Twitter: @sydfinkelstein
Facebook: The Sydcast
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Dr. Rita Charon
Website: sps.columbia.edu
Twitter: @RitaCharon
Book: Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness
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