Listen and followApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes
Join Dustin Grinnell, the author of The Healing Book. Dustin takes us on a journey through this thought-provoking collection of short stories, where characters embark on paths of self-discovery, healing, and personal growth. We delve into the inspiration behind the book, explore the diverse stories within it, and discuss the intersection of science, medicine, and spirituality in his writing.
Dustin Grinnell is a writer.
He discusses his book, The Healing Book.
Our presenting sponsor is Nuance, a Microsoft company.
Together, Microsoft and Nuance are leveraging their rich digital technology and advanced AI capabilities to tackle some of health care’s biggest challenges. AI-driven technology promises to revolutionize patient and provider experiences with clinical documentation that writes itself.
The Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience, or DAX for short, is a voice-enabled solution that automatically captures patient encounters securely and accurately at the point of care. DAX Copilot combines proven conversational and ambient AI with the most advanced generative AI in a mobile application that integrates directly with your existing workflows.
Physicians who use DAX have reported a 50 percent decrease in documentation time and a 70 percent reduction in feelings of burnout, and 85 percent of patients say their physician is more personable and conversational.
Discover AI-powered clinical documentation that writes itself. Visit https://nuance.com/daxinaction to see a 12-minute DAX Copilot demo.
VISIT SPONSOR → https://nuance.com/daxinaction
SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST → https://kevinmd.com/podcast
RECOMMENDED BY KEVINMD → https://kevinmd.com/recommended
GET CME FOR THIS EPISODE → https://earnc.me/4OApdv
Powered by CMEfy.
Transcript
Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast, and get CME for this episode by clicking on the CME link in the show notes. Today we welcome back Dustin Grinnell. He’s a writer, and we’re going to talk about his latest book, The Healing Book. Dustin, welcome back to the show.
Dustin Grinnell: Thanks for having me.
Kevin Pho: So go to KevinMD.com/podcast, you can search for Dustin’s name and his prior episode and story. But today we’re going to talk about his latest book, The Healing Book. So what were the events that led you to write this book?
Dustin Grinnell: So The Healing Book is about, really it’s about the power of reading, and books, and the reading experience, to help us heal in various ways. This is a topic that I’ve been interested in for a very long time, really since I was a kid. I’ve always read books for purposes other than escape, for purposes of helping me understand myself better, understand other people better.
There is a field actually called bibliotherapy, and I’ve seen you’ve had someone on to talk about that, and this is a field I got very interested in. It’s really the use of books as therapy, reading as therapy. It dates back to the ancient Greeks, who inscribed over their library, “healing place for the soul,” right?
So I got very inspired by this idea. I did a critical review of bibliotherapy and published an article on that, but I really wanted to fictionalize the material. So I ended up writing a short story called “The Healing Book” that published with Intima, a medical humanities journal. And it was really a story about a couple trying to manage a terminal illness. A doctor’s wife had metastatic breast cancer, and they were unable to cure the disease with traditional approaches, so the doctor started to use more alternative therapies.
And it’s sort of a fantastic story about what would happen if someone tried to write a book that could heal a physical malady like cancer. It doesn’t work in the story. There’s no way a book could stop the march of a tumor or anything like that. But it did end up helping his wife deal with the uncertainty and fear of death, and his ability to write a book for her provided comfort in her last days. So that short story then became the basis for 12 more short stories that all revolve around self-discovery and healing, and that is The Healing Book.
Kevin Pho: And for these short stories, how did you get the ideas for these 12 short stories? Where did they come from?
Dustin Grinnell: Yeah, this book is kind of interesting in the sense that my previous books have been really speculative, really imaginative. I was talking with you a year ago about The Empathy Academy, and that was about a fictional world, a fictional technology, and it was a cautionary tale, like a true technology thriller.
This collection is really a departure from that style. It’s a little bit more literary, and it’s a little bit more, I would say actually a lot more, based on my own personal experiences. There’s a genre of writing called autofiction that’s really fictionalizing your own experiences. So all of these stories have a little bit of me in them.
And that kind of approach to writing, I found it really strengthened the writing, the write-what-you-know approach. And it also provided maybe what’s called autotherapy. It’s a way of using art, using fiction in this case, of working through your own experiences and trying to give meaning to them, and ultimately figure out a way to let them go.
So I was maybe, in a sense it sounds a little grandiose, but I was trying to heal myself, talking about negative experiences in corporate America and the toxic situations that I had experienced during restructurings and such, and just trying to figure out what those experiences meant to me. And through that experience of autotherapy, I’m hoping that maybe others will take knowledge or wisdom from them.
Kevin Pho: So give us an example of one of these autotherapeutic stories that’s in the book, that you used to write to heal yourself. What would be an example of that?
Dustin Grinnell: So one of the short stories that I wrote was called “The Cubicle,” and I was really inspired by this documentary filmmaker called Frederick Wiseman. He has a very interesting body of work where he just kind of makes documentaries with a very minimalistic approach. So he’ll just go into a library and he’ll just roll cameras, right? And there’ll be no music, no on-camera interviews.
So I thought, what would it be like if a character was a student filmmaker and he went into an office setting, and he was young, he was college age, so he didn’t really know politics, he didn’t really know hierarchies, he didn’t really know power struggles, he didn’t really know about the interpersonal conflicts that can happen in an office setting? So what if he went in and took a Frederick Wiseman approach to filmmaking and made a documentary essentially about the office?
And he basically just rolls cameras during performance reviews, during corporate restructuring, during power struggles, during gossiping and rumors, and all the kinds of toxicities that can happen within an office setting. And it was a way of almost looking at the office like an anthropologist might, not really judging it, just observing it. And I found that that was kind of an interesting way to get stuff out of me, things I’ve observed that I thought were bad behavior or immoral or abusive. And it turns out that just made me feel a little bit better about what I had seen.
Kevin Pho: So on this podcast we have an audience of health care professionals. Are there any stories that can impart any lessons or messages to the health care audience as a whole?
Dustin Grinnell: Yeah, I think just in general, the idea of bibliotherapy, the idea of reading for therapeutic purposes, can be something to explore. Which is to say, there’s the three-legged stool of medicine. You’ve got one leg, drugs and medications, and another leg, surgeries and interventions. But the third leg is self-care, exercise, sleep, stress reduction, things like that. Bibliotherapy is in that third leg, I think.
And so to what degree could health care providers give books to their patients, maybe even fictional texts, to help them understand their own illness, to understand the experience of being sick, to give words to things that they don’t have words to express? That in and of itself can be very healing from a social-emotional standpoint. So you can still treat the illness through the first two legs, but for the third leg, consider bibliotherapy.
There’s a doctor I interviewed for an article on bibliotherapy, David Elpern. He’s out in western Massachusetts, and he actually showed me a prescription pad that he has for his patients. He actually prescribes books to patients, which I think is really radical and interesting, and potentially something that others could try.
Kevin Pho: So let me ask that question again, this time from the perspective of patients. And you mentioned of course the whole genre of bibliotherapy. How can reading your book, from a patient perspective, how can that be therapeutic for patients?
Dustin Grinnell: I would say all of the stories are examples of the power of introspection, the power of examining ourselves, the power of living an examined life and trying to figure out who we really are, what we really want, so that we can make decisions that are better matched for ourselves. And I think if readers can follow characters who are really trying to discover themselves and find their best place in the world, I think that could be of great help.
And the book in general, I think one of the biggest themes is, how do we find meaning in our lives? Because ultimately what we’re doing is, we’re trying to find meaning, we’re trying to find purpose. And if you can watch characters go through that struggle themselves, maybe it can help you in your own.
Kevin Pho: So tell me some of the responses that you’ve had to the book, and it could be from the perspective of either patients or health professionals.
Dustin Grinnell: Yeah, well, I actually had one reader say something I didn’t expect, which is that through these stories I am exploring different healing modalities, from psychotherapy to in one case neurosurgery. There’s examples of the treatment of malaria. There’s a lot of physical interventions that are displayed in the stories. But one reader said that she found that a lot of the curative agents in the stories was love, the power of love to bring us out of a demoralized state, a state of melancholy.
And I think health care providers can’t prescribe love, but I think what I was trying to explore in fiction was, what is the power of not just romantic love but love between friends? What is the power of a friend in dealing with an illness? What is the power of companionship? What is the power of camaraderie and solidarity?
In book clubs we get to share our feelings about the way stories interact with us. And one of the big findings in Alcoholics Anonymous was that the ritualized sharing of stories between people who had dealt with addictions was healing, because it allowed us to imagine ourselves in someone else’s experience, that feeling of solidarity. These are the various forms of love that I think can be very healing, in ways that we don’t quite expect, for diseases that we wouldn’t expect.
Kevin Pho: One of the reasons why you wrote the book, that you said earlier, was as a form of autotherapy. So tell me, after writing the book and after reflecting on the stories, did this book change you?
Dustin Grinnell: I think I’m a little bit better grounded in experiences. One of the things I explored in the study of bibliotherapy is, what are the mechanisms, how is it actually working, and what is it quote-unquote healing? And I think one of the things I found was, just having the words to describe what you’re going through, having the vocabulary, can be extremely healing.
So the other part of this is not just knowing what to call things, but it’s to arrange your experiences, particularly negative experiences, into a coherent story. And I think a lot of patients can probably attest to this, especially in a psychotherapeutic setting. One of the problems with being in a crisis or dealing with a traumatic event is just the incomprehensibility about it. You don’t know how to make sense of it, and you don’t have the words to hang things on to.
So what writing this book did, I think, was it gave me all this vocabulary to turn up the things that had happened to me in my life and then put them into a fictionalized story with structure, that had a problem and then a resolution. And did I heal myself through that process? I don’t know. I think I’m just a little bit more well integrated, I think, and less afraid of the negative experiences. And I think when you have the vocabulary and the story through which to examine traumatic experiences, they lose their power, they loosen their grip on you, and you can start to talk about them objectively. And I think that’s the power of storytelling.
Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Dustin Grinnell. He’s a writer. His latest book is The Healing Book. Dustin, let’s end with some of your take-home messages to the KevinMD audience.
Dustin Grinnell: So one of the things I have been really curious about lately is the power of the placebo effect and the nocebo effect. I just finished a novella actually that is dealing with these two phenomena. And I think if I had any kind of advice or wisdom to impart, I wouldn’t look at the placebo effect as a nuisance. I would look at it as a possible tool in your toolbox.
Years ago when I was having abdominal pain, I’m quite certain now that it was driven by stress and probably reflux or something, but I was a little bit worried about it, and I went in to my primary care doctor. And I think he obviously knew that, right, and most of us go in for stress-related reasons anyways. And he provided some comforting words, he listened to me attentively, and ultimately he ended up giving me an injection in the lower right quadrant of my stomach. And to this day I’m certain that it was saline, and I walked out of there feeling better.
It’s the theater of medicine. It’s the white walls, it’s the white coat, it’s the smell of antiseptic. That in and of itself has healing power. We know that. That is the power of the placebo effect. It’s just a testament to the power of the mind in the healing process. There’s a quote that goes something like, the art of medicine is to amuse the patient while they get better themselves, while their own healing mechanisms kick in. So I wouldn’t discount the power of the placebo effect in practice.
And then I also wouldn’t discount the power of the kind of dark twin of the placebo, which is the nocebo effect. And that is the ability to set up negative expectations in a patient, which can drive negative outcomes. So try to keep that in mind when you’re talking with a patient. Even if they’re trying, your patients, remember that some negative words, even just a look of dismissiveness, these can be very powerful stimuli to patients. They can set up a negative expectation that I’m not going to get better, or my doctor doesn’t want me to get better. And the mind-body connection can actually drive negative outcomes as a result.
Kevin Pho: Dustin, thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for coming back on the show.
Dustin Grinnell: Thank you.
Listen and followApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes
