The Patient as Parable

The Patient as Parable

This paper integrates insights from clinical narrative essays with frameworks from liberation medicine, critical medical anthropology, and restorative justice theory to propose a unified model of healing as justice. Drawing upon Paul Farmer's concept of accompaniment, Nancy Scheper-Hughes's embodied witnessing, and legal theories of dignity and repair, this study positions the physician as moral witness, narrative interpreter, and advocate for healing justice. Enhanced with insights from shame-based healing paradigms (1), Catholic social thought (2), and ontological theories of suffering and healing (3), this framework bridges personal therapeutic presence with structural analysis, offering a vision of medicine that recognizes the therapeutic encounter as a site where dignity is restored, suffering is witnessed, and justice is enacted through sacred attentiveness.