Telling Health Stories

What ‘s your favorite health care blog?

Don’t have one? I don’t either. That’s because the topic of health is often very convoluted and quite honestly, boring. There is a new buzz-word in the health communication arena that’s aiming to change all that- “storytelling.” Using basic storytelling techniques can help educate, motivate, and empower people to make informed decisions about their health. “Stories Matter”, an essay by University of Missouri professor Jacqui Banaszynski, is a perfect example of using the storytelling technique on a subject that may be hard to relate to. Banaszynski doesn’t simply write about a famine camp in Sudan. She takes the reader (someone who may never go to Sudan) on a journey with her as she herself for the first time witnesses starvation, desperation and sometimes survival despite it all. This is a technique she uses to draw in and involve an otherwise uninterested and disconnected reader.

There isn’t enough storytelling in health and there isn’t a good enough reason why. Health communication’s goal is to influence healthy behavior choices by providing accurate and useful information, and what better way to influence than through stories?

The storytelling technique used in health can create health information that resonates with the target audiences. Often times in research you find studies devoid of the human element as if people were nothing more than a class, gender, sex or social economic status. Storytelling in health takes the “us vs. them” out of the science by bringing a universality of human connectivity. Banaszynski writes:

“We all grew up with stories, but do we ever stop to think about how much they connect us and how powerful they are? Even, or especially, in the face of death these stories live on, passed from elder to younger, from generation to generation. Events pass, people live and die, life changes. But stories endure.”

How can health communicators write health stories? You can take everyday people and tell their personal experience with health. Let’s take an example of a person dealing with kidney disease and who has to rely on dialysis treatment. Invite the reader into the story by painting a picture of what it’s like to live with this condition. Several trips a week to the dialysis center is non negotiable-it’s a necessity to stay alive. Show the reader what it’s like to spend hours hooked up to a machine designed to do what the body no longer can- cleanse toxins from the body. Through storytelling techniques like this example, health communicators can educate people in the community about kidney disease and steps they can take to ensure a long and healthy life.

It’s widely known in the health field that new discoveries in science and medicine vastly outnumber the actual utilization of this knowledge. Simply put, the information isn’t trickling down to the people who need it most. This disconnect presents a challenge to both health professionals and the public. The huge number of research findings published, disseminated, and reported on daily have to be interpreted by one and understood appropriately by the other.

So dig through the science and medicine and find these stories and provide a human element to them. That’s how people will listen to what you have to say, when you involve them in the story. There are many untold stories in health. These are the kinds of stories that should cross our TV screens, airwaves and web, but mainstream media don’t report on them. Health policy affects the public but we rarely hear about the latest policy issues being discussed in Congress. There’s an opportunity to take these policy issues and ask the public how they feel about them. Shed light on these untold stories, not only for Congress to hear but also to empower the people affected the most with information to make informed decisions about their health.

David Halberstam, author of The Best and the Brightest gives this advice to people who want to tell stories: “Telling a good story demands a great conception, a great idea for why the story works-for what it is and how it connects to the human condition. It’s about ideas, about narration, about telling a story. You must be able to point to something larger.”

And what could be larger than a long and healthy life for all?