Two Forms of Truth

“Poetry helps me to remain intellectually humble as a doctor, to be comfortable with revision and failure and drafting and redrafting, not to ‘anchor’ — to bias yourself towards your first thought.

“Medicine in general is very interested in logical cause and effect, and is very highly conscious of what we can say with certainty. But I think that the way patients often experience illness is far more inchoate. Patients may sometimes feel unheard or misunderstood when their experience in their bodies is translated by allopathic medicine into something that is a lot more quantitative and metrical and linear.

“Tools like poetry and other arts can help serve important interpretive work in trying to negotiate between the empirical work that medicine does and the experiential perceptions of patients. It helps to acknowledge that both of those are forms of truth, but that they might require some negotiation and adaptation and flexibility in order to be able to speak to each other effectively.

“In poetry, I’m often interested in playing and shifting back and forth to build that bridge and unify those two parts of ourselves: The very clinical and detached, and then the part of ourselves that’s the warm and beating heart of who we are.”