ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the correctives and challenges to narrative studies related to healing. Western biomedicine does engage in healing — through creating a story that matters to the patient with the reportability of responding to an existential threat that legitimates a claim on society's resources. Arthur Frank writes in the genre of the wounded storyteller, firmly grounded in the world of medicine as a subculture. Arthur Frank's rambling stories about his personal illness lack the rigor of an autoethnography and his book lacks actual data, yet other narrativists almost universally cite him as authoritative. Cheryl Mattingly presents no data whatsoever of how doctors interact with patients but relegates them to "fast time," implying insufficient time to address real concerns. Mattingly's comments about "doctor time" are only true in an inpatient rehabilitation setting.
