A Critical Review of Narrative-Based Medicine — Its Recent Development and Prospective Outlook

Narrative-based medicine is a medical model that provides clinicians with a constructivist approach to understanding, empathizing and acting upon patients’ experience of pain and illness. This medical model can work parallel to, and can be integrated with, evidence-based medicine in clinical practice. This article provides a comprehensive review of narrative-based medicine, examining its theoretical background, its development and its implementation in recent medical practice. The dialectical relationship between narrative medicine and evidence-based medicine is discussed before an integrated framework is proposed that allows both medical models to work together in China’s medical care system. Finally, it argues that the narrative-based model can play an important role in China’s fast-moving translational medicine.