When taking a true history can heal patients… and their doctors

'When you train to be a health professional, you are systematically desensitised from thinking about the person as anything but a body.'
Luke Ryan
Dr Rita Charon. Photo: Vincent Ricardel/National Endowment for the Humanities.

I was 11 when I fell, suddenly and irrevocably, into the medical system.

A fist-sized osteogenic sarcoma growing out the back of my left knee.