Questão 9 (1º semestre) do São Camilo 2025

One of the chief complaints about physicians (doctors of medicine) these days is that they don’t have enough time and they don’t really listen. So, Dr. Schillinger, a primary care physician at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, has written a book, Telltale Hearts, about the importance of patients’ stories. He writes of the power of narrative to build trust that cuts through the barriers that often separate doctors and patients to ultimately improve care.

“What has increasingly been lost as we advance in our technologies, using electronic health records that make us look at the computer and not at the patient, and becoming more constrained from a time perspective, is the most important and common medical procedure — the medical interview,” Dr. Schillinger told. “A lot of people think that the doctor is asking the patient too many questions, but that’s not really how it should go,” he added. “It really should be about bringing out the patient’s perspective on the experience and their social context.”

Science is most important, he said, but the patient’s story is an essential complement. “It’s when we separate the two that we get in trouble,” Dr. Schillinger said. His book is about what he thinks of as “the alchemy of science and story.” Ultimately, however, Telltale Hearts is about a growing area of medical research: the ways in which socioeconomic factors like poverty, racism and marginalization — and associated ills like lack of food, housing insecurity and exposure to pollution and violence — shape the health of many Americans, as well as society’s obligation to do better.

The book is a cry for social change and a plea for the profession “to recognize the patient as one of our own, not just someone to manage and get through the system of health care,” Dr. Schillinger said. “It’s about finding our shared humanity in a world that is constantly pressuring us to take shortcuts and to rely on impersonal ways of managing very complex human problems,” he added.