When we attend to both the story and the body that tells it, we move beyond treating disease. We accompany people. We don’t just understand symptoms — we begin to understand lives.
Illness lives in the body — and so does the story of it. You can hear it in a pause before someone answers. You can see it in the way they shift in a chair, the tightness in a jaw, the way breath catches or slows. These are not incidental details. They are part of the narrative, carrying meaning that lab results and scan reports can’t capture.
This is embodied storytelling: when words and the body work together to communicate the lived experience of health and illness.
https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/narrative-embodiment-and-health/2025-06
Lynch Syndrome Ireland 