On Sunday, Dr. Annie Brewster pointed out what she called a flaw in how medical science assesses certain approaches to healing that don’t come out of lab trials.
“The medical community will often respond with ‘Where’s the data to support this approach?’” she said.
Her response: “Not everything can be measured.”
The Harvard Medical School professor told a full sanctuary at the Peterborough Unitarian Universalist Church as part of the Monadnock Summer Lyceum that having people tell their stories of illness and trauma can help with healing, as can listening to them. Brewster is also the founder and executive director of the Health Story Collaborative, which was honored with Harvard Medical School’s Dean’s Community Service Award in 2022.
Brewster likened the stories people tell to a stone tossed into a still pond.
“It creates ripples, and they just keep going outward,” she said, explaining that telling stories is “a relational act – we learn from listening to each other.”
Brewster’s own medical issues were a catalyst for this approach to healing. While studying at Harvard Medical in her 20s in 2001, she noticed emerging symptoms that turned out to be multiple sclerosis. She noted that her attending physician was emphatically sure about the diagnosis and matter-of-fact to the point of appearing to lack any empathy.
“This was corporate medicine, and I wondered how I could do something better than this,” she said. “I sought out stories of how people move forward from challenges, and started recording some patient stories.”
Brewster trained in the technical areas of this endeavor, created “Listening to Patients” at WBUR in Boston and founded HSC in 2013.
Central to all humans is what Brewster calls “narrative identity” — that people are shaped by the stories they tell ourselves and others.
“We recall all our high points, and the lows, and scaffold them to create memories. It’s how we remember our past and it will shape our future,” she said.
Brewster added that there are certain themes to storytelling, a few of which include redemption, when things move from bad to good in a certain chapter; contamination, when they go in the other direction; and accommodative processing, when people work to have stories make sense.
Brewster shared audio recordings of patients telling their stories, but not all stories have to be with words. One case involved a female patient at Massachusetts General Hospital whose X-rays and body images revealing her malady were used as instructive aides without her consent. She proceeded to tell her story through painting, creating her own beauty that the clinicians at MGH could not see.
“When people share, it gives permission for others to do so as well. Storytelling is relational,” said Brewster, adding that, for the data-hungry cynics out there, “There are studies showing how telling one’s story can have healing effects at a neural level.”
Equally important, she said, there are studies showing how listening to the stories of others can help people with the same maladies improve.
“This includes cases of people with high blood pressure being able to lower theirs by hearing from others with high BP,” she said.
A case Brewster conveyed involved a woman telling a relative about a great-grandmother who held her child close as the child passed away. Later, the person to whom this story was told became ill and was not responding to chemotherapy. She asked the woman who had told her the story to hold her as the great-grandmother had done, and in the embrace of the woman who shared the tale, the cancer patient died peacefully.
Asked whether conveying narratives can help with mental as well as physical challenges, Brewster answered an emphatic “yes.”
“The mind and body as two separate parts of us is an artificial distinction,” he said.
Regarding the matter of discussing an incurable disease, Brewster said that this is when the theme of accommodative processing might help.
“We can’t control what happens, but we can control how we make meaning of it,” she said.