Keywords: Narrative Based Medicine; Patient; Doctor; Narrative; Memory; Communication.
The present paper aims at treating the problem of the validation of the main assumptions
of the Narrative Based Medicine approach (NBM). In the first part of this paper, the authors
stress six different meanings narrative acquires in the medical care context and,
for each of them, they analyze psychological processes that are involved. The Authors
underline also the necessity that NBM assumptions refer to the development of scientific
investigations on narrative processes, memory, language and communication. The second
part of this paper takes in consideration the fact that nbm and Narrative Psychology have
developed in parallel without a mutual interaction, and that this lack of dialogue could be
due to the difficulty of interdisciplinary communication between Medicine and Psychology.
Some possible trends of research are then presented in order to validate in a direct
or in an indirect way NBM models. Moreover it is claimed that medical training can make
use of narrative concepts and methodology in order to increase medical proficiency in
communication and comprehension of clinical anamnestic data.