Meditation-narration: A new self-practice for medical students. Five-year assessment of a pedagogical experiment

Teaching medical humanities to medical students can improve their mental health, empathy, and care relationships. Among the fields of study, mindfulness and narrative medicine have been shown to have real value in promoting their health and empathic skills. These two practices complement each other and can be combined theoretically, particularly with regard to neuroscience and neuro-phenomenology, in an original approach to self-care and attention to others for medical students. The practice of mindfulness not only supports the practical triad of narrative medicine (attention-representation-affiliation), but also processes linked to attentiveness and the creative, intuitive imagination. This article discusses these theoretical bases and proposes a five-year assessment of the practical implementation and optimization of the teaching of these two practices in combination, as part of an optional complementary teaching module in DFSAM1 (fourth year of medical training) at the University of Bordeaux.