DonK Humanitarian Medicine is the spokesperson for the practice of “Narrative Medicine”. This clinical-assistance methodology is little known, not only in Friuli Venezia Giulia but also in Italy, yet it proves to be of great use.

It comes from Anglo-Saxon countries and is based on a specific communicative competence. The goal is the shared construction of a personalized treatment path whose narrations, carried out by both the patient and the doctor who assists him, is an essential element on contemporary medicine based on the active participation of the subjects involved in the choices. The narrative, therefore, becomes the means through which to acquire, understand and integrate the different points of view of all those who intervene in the disease and in the treatment process.

Some nurses from the Santa Maria degli Angeli Hospital in Pordenone were among the first to practice Narrative Medicine in our region. Beautiful are the words of one of them, Stefania Toffolo: “It all begins with an interview, using what we call a narrative posture. It is a posture of listening, of attention, of silence, of the right words used with extreme care. We need to be able to stay in the history of those we met without ever minimizing”.

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