I'm Alan Alda, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

I say that the public hospital is the place where healthcare meets social reality.

And it's one of the only places in our

society where people of different backgrounds mixed together for a common cause. And what we do see

is the effects of marginalization on health in a very big way. And most of this is hidden from, you know, larger society. And so

ultimately, yes, a lot of my life has been dedicated to trying to reverse that either at the

individual level with my own patients or at a larger societal level with my public health work.

That's Dr. Dean David Schillinger.

He's been the chief resident physician at San Francisco General Hospital for almost 30 years.

And during that time, he became a firm believer in the power of getting his patients

to share the story that brought them to the hospital, a story that may go back many months or even

years. And in turn, he shared many of those stories in his book, Tell Tale, Tales, Hearts.

Well, this is going to be great talking with you today, because we talk a lot about communication

on this show. Sometimes only loosely do we talk about communication.

But this is really serious because there may be no more important communication for each one of us than what we have with our doctors.

And you have a really interesting angle on it. Your book is all about the importance of story in the doctor-patient relationship and not just medical facts.

How do you distinguish story from what too often goes on in the encounter with a doctor?

Well, story is the much larger context of a person's life, the context that they bring into the clinical encounter, and they may present with factual signs and symptoms,

but those often are a manifestation or a result of the story that they've had throughout their life,

which I think of as a series of life exposures, and environmental that have shaped their health in large

part. I mean, we often think that health is a personal choice, but really what we've learned

over many, many years of public health research is that about 80% of health is a function of

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