Listening to and letting pain speak: poetic reflections

Abstract

The humanities invite opportunities for people to describe through their metaphors, symbols and language a means in which to interpret their pain and reinterpret their new lived experiences. The patient and family all live with pain and can only use their pain narratives of that experience to confront or even to begin to understand the quantifiable discipline of medicine. The patient and family narratives act to retain meaning within a lived pained experience. These narratives add meaning to the person as a stay against only having a clinical–pathological understanding of what is happening to our body and as a person. We need to understand the pathology pain while also being mindful of suffering. In this article, the theoretical and scientific approach to pain research and clinical practice intersects with the philosophical, ontological and reflective lived experience of the person living with pain. Through unique pain narratives, poetry and stories as a means of offering empathy and understanding as healing, the humanities in medicine bring into meaning another kind of therapy equal to the evidence-based medicine clinicians and researchers use to seek a cure. In this way, the medical humanities are addressing the person’s healing through the reduction of suffering and isolation by letting pain speak while others can focus in on their medical knowledge/practice and research while ‘finding’ a cure. Listening to pain opens-up to the possibility that much can be learned through multiple expressions of the pain narrative. This article provides an invitation to learn how we might articulate and listen to pain carefully and differently.