In “Challenges of Introducing Narrative Medicine to South Korea: A Grounded Theory Approach,” researcher Sarah Se-Jung Oh investigates why narrative medicine has not gained traction in South Korea. The most frequent barrier cited by her participants is a mismatch between time and compensation: Clinicians expressed little motivation to invest in learning or practicing narrative skills when such work is not financially rewarded. The second most common explanation concerns differences between consultation cultures in South Korea and in Western contexts, where narrative medicine originated. As someone involved in introducing narrative dentistry into graduate education in Canada, I could argue that both reasons reflect the broader global medical culture.

From their inception, dentistry–and healthcare more broadly–have prioritized issuing directives over listening, valuing patient “compliance” and “cooperation” rather than shared understanding. This tendency can be traced back to the models of health and disease that have shaped medical practice and education since the 17th century: mind–body dualism, germ theory, the doctrine of specific etiology and, ultimately, the biomedical model.

According to the biomedical model, each disease has a specific biological cause—trauma, pathogens, genetic, etc.—and the clinician’s task is simply to identify that cause and prescribe the ideal treatment to return the patient to a default “healthy” state. Despite attempts to adopt biopsychosocial approaches, health systems have a long journey ahead. As long as we demand reductive answers from patients, we will continue teaching students to ask close-ended questions, search for quick diagnostic clues, and direct patients with minimal input from them.

Reflecting on Ligia Batista’s short story “Maps to Nowhere,” we also see how educators may feel alienated within biomedical teaching structures, encountering barriers when trying to convey the lived essence of a disease to students rather than the standardized, reductionist biomedical content that typically dominates the curriculum.

I believe educators should remain steadfast in integrating the humanities into health professions education. There are many—particularly systemic—barriers to such efforts, but the outcomes can be deeply rewarding. Our own research, “Towards Biopsychosocial Approaches in Healthcare: Postgraduate Dentistry Students’ Experience of Transformative Education,” which explored dental graduate students’ experiences in a narrative medicine-based course, made this clear to us. Although students initially struggled with unconventional teaching and assessment methods and even questioned whether comics counted as legitimate educational tools, they ultimately reported deep enjoyment, a shift toward more person-centered thinking, and a sense of safety they rarely felt elsewhere. For this reason, I encourage educators to embrace narrative-medicine approaches in any context, even when the surrounding system seems resistant.