Narrative medicine is a methodology which prizes the patient's words and stories of illness as a vital reservoir of clinically-useful information. The need for doctors with "narrative competence", or the ability to draw upon patients' stories of illness for clinical purposes, becomes especially clear against the backdrop of the rise of evidence-based and personalized medicine. The clinical and technological achievements of both evidence-based medicine and personalized medicine promise to considerably augment the doctor's ability to make sound clinical decisions. But they can also serve as conduits for historically rooted attitudes toward clinical uncertainty which damage both the doctor's own powers of decision-making and the fragile doctor-patient relationship. Such attitudes are based on the belief that medicine, in its quest to function as an exact science, can fully eliminate uncertainty. Narrative medicine, grounded in the uniqueness of each patient, squarely confronts uncertainty and presents practitioners with methods for clinical decision-making which can augment the tools afforded them by evidence-based and personalized medicine. Accordingly, narrative medicine is a critical component of both the art and the science of medicine.
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