Narrative medicine: conceptual delineations

Abstract Narrative medicine as both a cognitive paradigm and a clinical method requires ways to be differentiated from existing paradigms. From the perspective of philosophical rhetorics, this article clarifies a series of semantic distinction in four conceptual pairs: narrative medicine and narrative therapy, narrative medicine and evidence-based medicine, narrative medicine and narrative nursing, modern medical narration and traditional Chinese medical narration. It aims to resolve cognitive ambiguities and biases within these categories and reveal their underlying meanings not through finding common ground but through seeking differences that could become transformative possibilities – to achieve clinical thinking interaction through cognitive embeddedness.