If medicine is practiced with these skills, the clinician or trainee has much to offer his/her patient. By listening with attention, he/she can hear and receive in full complexity what the patient is conveying in words, silences, gestures, body positions as well as physical findings.
As a result, this clinician, by using narrative competence, becomes a witness instead of a judge, a companion instead of an interrogator, an ally instead of a bearer of bad news or the inflictor of discomfort only. This gives the doctor sufficient knowledge to develop a clinically helpful and useful affiliation with the person he is treating.
In my humble opinion, narrative medicine is meant to treat the whole person and not only the illness. If doctors and psychiatrists are able to brush up on their listening skills, life will be a lot easier for their patients.