People’s Pharmacy: How Do Patients’ Stories Shape Their Care?

Narrative Medicine and the Value of Patients’ Stories:
Dr. Sonia Rapaport treats medically complex patients with undiagnosed or hard-to-treat conditions. Listening to their stories is crucial to figuring out what may be wrong with them and helping them see how they can live more fully even when they can’t be completely cured.
Find out how narrative medicine can be integrated with a data-based medical framework. Do older healing traditions play a role in helping patients recover? In addition, what does it mean to truly listen to patients’ stories and help them change the narrative? Do they feel better after they embrace the new narrative? Dr. Rapaport describes the key principles she uses in addressing her patients’ suffering.
Sonia Rapaport, MD, is a functional and integrative medicine physician whose practice, Haven Medical in Chapel Hill, NC, focuses on environmentally acquired illnesses. She treats medically complex patients with undiagnosed illnesses and complex disorders such as mold illness, Lyme disease, mast cell activation syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, EDS and POTS. She’s the founding president of the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness. Dr. Rapaport has an MFA in creative writing and has lectured nationally on narrative medicine. She’s also an expert on tea and health and a certified tea sommelier.