2026 JABSOM GHHS Essay Contest - 3rd Place

The Human, and the Human Who Heals Them

by Kalpana Balaraman, MS2

She yanked the door open and strode briskly into the room, lingering her hand on the door knob to swing it quickly shut after I trickled into the patient room behind her, trying to be as smooth and non-disruptive as a shadow. She always moves hastily; as the chief of family medicine in an outpatient clinic, one would think that she rarely has time to slow down and take a breath. But when we walked into this particular room, where a lone older gentleman with a white KN95 mask sat soberly on the straightback exam table, she calmly left her laptop on the table near the door and sat down on a short stool, rolling herself forward until her knees were slightly touching his, and her hands grasping his, enveloping them in warmth and comfort. She obtained his permission to record their conversation via Abridge, and for the next few minutes, her eyes never left his.

In The Principles and Practices of Narrative Medicine, Dr. Rita Charon describes the three main pillars of narrative medicine to be that of attention (bear witness), representation (write about the clinical encounter), and affiliation (take action and invest in a patient’s unique situation), and that by understanding each patient’s lived experience of illness and having them feel heard and respected, we are able to create a therapeutic alliance built on trust and partnership. Furthermore, in his 2021 conversation with Lisa Fortuna (hosted by UCSF), Resmaa Menakem speaks of the importance of creating and inviting bodies of culture into spaces for healing. Per Menakem, it is our duty as healers to be malleable, to serve them (rather than fix them), to validate their experiences, and accompany them on their journey; and furthermore, many of the tools we would use to embody this are not cultivated in our training, but rather in our homes and in the roots of our cultures.

Especially in this post-COVID world, where the idea of a touch may incite fear rather than comfort and telehealth encounters predominate in the name of convenience and a child’s first experience at the doctor’s office may not be staring at the face of a human but rather a snugly fit mask with a pair of expressive eyes above it, receiving a patient’s telling of their history as a human may not be the easiest feat to undertake, but my preceptor always does a fantastic job of acknowledging the whole person in front of her.

My preceptor greets and concludes almost every single patient encounter with a hug, because that’s what’s considered a standard greeting in our local culture. As the point of care and advocate for many patients who may fall within a historically underserved and mistreated population, “how” she practices medicine is just as important as “what” she practices. The patient we met with was at the clinic for a routine primary care follow-up, to speak about potential adjustments to his medications since his hypertension was not seeming to be controlled adequately on his current medication regimen. But more important than his numbers was that this was his first primary care visit since the death of his wife, and what he needed most in that space was not somebody to tell him what was going wrong or what to do next, but rather someone to listen to him, to give him a chance to tell his story out loud, to share in the action of keeping his memories of his wife alive. In giving him the space he needed, in bearing witness to his story, my preceptor became the facilitator of his healing.

While both the stereotypical responsibility of a physician and the experience of our medical training may ascend us to a false sense of omniscience, the fact is that medicine just as much art as it is science, and that we don’t have the answers to everything, and what highlights those who practice and live humanism in medicine is the way they guide their patients, their fellow human beings, through that uncertainty. We are given the profound privilege to bear witness to these stories - told out into the world in the voices of their owners - and it’s up to us to acknowledge their existence and become co-creators in how that story evolves.

Dr. Sherry Turkle states that in being “fully present to one another [in a face-to-face conversation], we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood.” But I would take it one step further and say that we, as the provider, as the other human in that room, experience our own joy in being there for someone, in observing someone we care for have their experiences validated. Our work as healers comes, both primarily and ultimately, from recognizing the human in front us, and introducing ourselves as the human there to receive them and guide them on this journey of healing. That is how we put the person, not the disease or the collection of symptoms, at the center of care.