Stories from the Margins: Immigrant Patients, Health Care, and Narrative Medicine

In this paper, I address the marginalization of Russian immigrant patients within the American medical system. I argue that their already vulnerable position as immigrants with serious illnesses or conditions is exacerbated by unfamiliar social, cultural, and psychological terrain. This complex situation calls for a revision of the clinician-patient model in favor of a more comprehensive approach that takes seriously their double marginalization and its effects. I claim that one such approach, narrative medicine, can begin to address their marginalized status by attending to not only the symptoms of the body, but to the story of the illness experience.