An excerpt from Real Medicine, Unreal Stories, Volume 3.

The café was quiet, tucked between a shuttered bookstore and a yoga studio that only seemed to open during Mercury retrograde. It was the kind of place that didn’t advertise, which made it perfect for writers, wanderers, and today, two physicians who had long since discovered that stories, not stethoscopes, were the truest diagnostic tools.

Dr. Gary Handler stirred his coffee absentmindedly, watching the cream swirl like a galaxy. Across from him sat Margot, an old friend, a retired physician, an artist, and sometime poet who painted with words when her brushes dried up.

“So let me get this straight,” she said, folding her reading glasses and pointing them at him like a tiny conductor’s baton. “You want to use my sentence as your LinkedIn tagline?”

Gary smiled sheepishly. “Just the part about storytelling. You said it so perfectly: ‘Storytelling is liberating itself from commerce, politics, and religion, and emerging as medicine and culture.’ It’s beautiful. That’s what we do, isn’t it? I mean, that’s what we want to do.”

She glanced at him. “Gary, that sentence is my life’s journey rendered to clarity.”

“Oh,” he said, sitting back. “So… no, then?”

“No,” she said, but not unkindly.

He laughed. “Fine. I made one up just in case. ‘Physician and author of stories that ignite passion, serving up medicine for the masses.'”

She considered it. “It’s beautiful. But is it you?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” he said. “We live in a world of taglines, one-liners, chief complaints. And the shorter the summary, the more we lose.”

Margot nodded slowly. “You sound like a man who’s been mis-tagged.”

“Maybe I’m just resisting compression,” he said. “Every time I try to define myself in a phrase, I feel like I’m marketing toothpaste.”

“Well, to be fair,” she said, “most of us are trying to leave people with a good taste in their mouth.”

They laughed.

He looked at her fondly. “Seriously. Isn’t that what medicine has become? A cascade of reductions. The diabetic in Room 3. The ‘sore on head’ in Room 7.”

Margot’s face lit with mischief. “Do not tell me that’s a euphemism.”

Gary winced. “Oh, it was. My first year of residency. Chart said ‘sore on head.’ I lifted the curtain and looked at the patient’s scalp. Nothing. I asked, ‘Show me the sore,’ and he dropped his pants. Turns out the ‘head’ in question wasn’t the one up north.”

Margot covered her mouth. “You’re kidding.”

“I wish I were. I prescribed penicillin. Then humility.”

They sat quietly for a moment, the sound of the espresso machine filling the space.

“You know,” he said after a while, “taglines aren’t all bad. They can be an opening. Like a chief complaint, they get us in the door. But the problem comes when we think that’s all there is.”

“Like mistaking the key for the whole house,” she said.

“Exactly.” He looked out the window. “It’s something I keep learning as a writer and a doctor. We love pithy stuff, but it’s never enough. You don’t treat the patient by treating the label. You don’t connect with a reader by giving them a slogan.”

“You connect,” she said, “by listening.”

He nodded. “By digging. Like Peter Gabriel said, ‘Digging in the dirt, to find the places we got hurt.’ Medicine’s supposed to help us do that. Storytelling too.”

Margot smiled. “So maybe that’s your tagline: Still digging.”

He chuckled. “I like that. Honest. Doesn’t pretend to be a final draft.”

“None of us are,” she said, reaching for her bag. “We’re all just working versions. Living stories.”

Gary picked up his pen, flipped open his notebook, and jotted it down: Still digging.

As she left, he sat with his coffee, letting the words settle.

Maybe the best stories weren’t meant to be compressed. Maybe they were meant to be discovered slowly, reverently, with enough curiosity to look beyond the surface.

And isn’t that what real medicine is, too?

Arthur Lazarus is a former Doximity Fellow, a member of the editorial board of the American Association for Physician Leadership, and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. He is the author of several books on narrative medicine, including Narrative Medicine: New and Selected Essays, and Narrative Rx: A Quick Guide to Narrative Medicine for Students, Residents, and Attendings, available as a free download.