Oliver Sacks talks about healthtalk.org and the importance of patient stories in teaching

The exciting thing about Healthtalkonline is that it will introduce you to lots of people who have all sorts of conditions and who respond to them in all sorts of ways. It’s very vivid, it’s very human and it can give the most amazing enlargement of experience. One couldn’t do in real life nearly as much as the videos provide and they’re wonderful teaching tools.

I once had a patient and I would introduce her to students and she would talk about herself. She would say “Look at this painless, this burn on my arm where I leant against a radiator and got burnt but didn’t feel it because I have no sensation of heat or pain in that arm”. She went on, she said that she had a rare condition called Syringomyelia, affecting the spinal cord. She said “Don’t try and remember this as something on page 920 in your text books, remember me. The way I am in the chair, the painless burn, my story. Think of me. I am Syringomyelia.” And I think this sort of embodiment of a condition in a person and their story is what comes through wonderfully in Healthtalkonline.

Although sometimes one can diagnose a condition, say like Parkinson’s Disease, when you’re 50 yards away, it is very important to meet the person, with the condition and to get their story which is the story, basically of how they have lived with the condition. Their experience of the condition, its impact on them and the way they adapt to it and this is going to be unique and individual with everyone you meet. So you must get a story. Also it’s fun, getting a narrative and getting a human story and the patient feels much more comfortable, they’re, they’re not just an object, sort of being interrogated and examined; they are telling you about themselves.