Articles

Background:</b> Within contemporary medical education systems dominated by the biomedical paradigm, medical students commonly experience a decline in empathy alongside uncertainty in professional identity formation. Narrative medicine, as an educational approach designed to bridge objective technical reasoning and subjective human experience, has been proposed as a response to this humanistic crisis. However, the psychological mechanisms underlying its effects, the boundaries of existing empirical evidence, and strategies for systematic implementation remain insufficiently clarified. <b>Content:</b> Drawing on a comprehensive review of the literature, this article elucidates two core theoretical mechanisms through which narrative medicine operates. First, through the cycle of attention, representation, and affiliation combined with reflective practice, narrative medicine facilitates the coordinated development of cognitive empathy and emotional resonance. Second, through narrative integration, it supports learners in transforming fragmented clinical experiences into coherent professional identities. A synthesis of empirical studies published over the past decade indicates that well designed narrative medicine curricula can enhance reflective capacity, communication skills, and a sense of professional meaning, although their effectiveness is substantially moderated by curricular intensity, pedagogical modality including digital and multimodal approaches, and cultural context. <b>Conclusion:</b> The integration of narrative medicine currently faces structural barriers, including limited curricular space, the scarcity of standardized assessment tools, and insufficient faculty development. Future efforts should adopt implementation science frameworks to shift from isolated elective offerings toward longitudinal spiral curricula, develop multidimensional evaluation strategies, and explore the use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality in narrative pedagogy. These efforts may establish narrative medicine as a foundational pathway for cultivating physicians with core humanistic competencies.

The present study raises the problem of empathy of caregivers vis-à-vis patients in a covid/post-covid context. It is based on the observation that health workers are increasingly invaded by excessive fear and persistence of COVID-19 contamination. This induces avoidance, a certain suspicion, persecution and indifference/coldness towards patients, and plunges them into a strong insidious emotional deficiency. These attitudes, which are significantly close to paranoid and phobic access, seem to gradually dominate therapeutic interactions within hospitals. Freudian and Rogerian psychoanalysis advocates empathetic/benevolent listening, positive consideration and unconditional acceptance of the patient as ethical and deontological indispensable principles for any therapeutic evolution. Thus, it is predicted that within hospitals, the current non empathetic attitudes of care towards patients have their origin in a generalized covid-phobic atmosphere that develops a quasi-dominant paranoia in caregivers. Using a subscale of caregiver's Covid-phobic quasi-paranoia, and the one of caregiver's empathy in a covid/post-covid context, the data were collected from 126 participants including 55 nursing assistants, 61 state-certified nurses and 10 doctors, chosen at random from the staff of three (03) health facilities in the city of Bafoussam, MIFI department, West Cameroon region, including one (01) public district medical center (CMA) and two (02) private hospitals (clinics). After analysis, the results obtained sufficiently demonstrate that within the health institutions of West Cameroon, the higher the professional level of the caregiver, the more the severity of his quasi-paranoid covid-phobic accesses is significant, and the less he expresses an authentic empathy towards the patients who arrive at the hospital. This implies that in this period of health crisis, caregivers must reinvest in a real function of providers of affectivity and relay of empathy at the bedside of the patient both in hospital and outpatient. Thus, a real systematical vaccination operation may insure their total immunity and better reduce their quasi-paranoid empathy in this generalized Covid-phobic context.