When my fellow Harvard Medical School classmates asked “what I was up to,” I called it my Rural Family Medicine Adventure Month. More formally, it was my extreme privilege and pleasure to learn Family Medicine across northern Maine and western Massachusetts as part of an independent study in rural primary care in June 2021. My travels brought me to the Jackman Community Health Center, the Northern Maine Medical Center, the Barre Family Health Center, the Behavioral Health Network Methadone Clinic, and the Community Health Center of Franklin County. I explored the ...

In many ways, medical school trains its pupils to be detectives, capable of discerning and interpreting even the most subtle physical signs of the human body. Yet, when patients are so generous as to entrust us with their stories, as illustrated by their verbal or body language, we often lack the skills – those akin to literary analyst – to elucidate motifs and themes that could both explain and perhaps facilitate the patient’s relationship to their health and the healthcare system. The ...