A fellow writer and I were having an online exchange. She said her painting was being interrupted by bursts of writing. She texted, “I’m writing about how storytelling is liberating itself from commerce, politics, religion, and emerging as medicine and culture.”
I asked if I could use her quote as my biographical tagline. On my LinkedIn profile I could say: “I write about how storytelling liberates us from commerce, politics, and religion, emerging as medicine and culture.”
“No,” she replied. “That sentence is my life’s journey rendered to clarity.”
Oh well, so much for T. S. Eliot’s advice: “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” So, I came up with a tagline of my own: “Physician and author of stories that ignite passion, serving up medicine for the masses.”
She called it “beautiful,” and perhaps it is. But is it me? That’s harder to say.
Overall, I’m not too sanguine about the idea of letting a tagline define me, even though shorthand seems to be endemic in our culture. I think much of this trend has been brought on by social media and other fads, like fast dating. However, quick impressions may result in “false negatives.” Taglines may turn off people who, if they took the time to dig a little deeper, would come to understand and appreciate you.
Taglines seduce us. They suggest clarity, confidence, and an invitation to be understood. Yet, in reducing ourselves to a handful of words, we risk being misunderstood – or worse, dismissed. The brevity that taglines demand plays into the societal shift toward quick judgments, one-liners, and snap impressions.
In a world dominated by social media, dating apps, and elevator pitches, people are increasingly defined by what they can project in seconds. This isn’t inherently wrong – first impressions matter – but the cost is high. How many meaningful connections never form because someone is filtered out prematurely, their essence misjudged by an overly hasty evaluation?
For writers like me, taglines can be a kind of paradox. We understand the value of words and take pride in their ability to convey depth. And yet, a tagline demands we limit ourselves to a few pithy phrases that inevitably simplify who we are. It feels like an act of reduction, as though we must squeeze our complexities into a single, marketable moment.
The tension between depth and reduction feels strikingly familiar to me as a physician. Medicine, like taglines, often risks distilling people into categories: patient profiles, diagnoses, chief complaints, or even billing codes. In the hurried pace of clinical practice, it’s easy to see a patient as “the diabetic in Room 3” or “the post-op knee replacement.” These shorthand descriptors, while practical, obscure the richness of a person’s story – the life they’ve lived, the challenges they face, the fears they carry.
The practice of medicine is ultimately the practice of presence: of seeing the whole person behind the label, just as we might hope others see the whole person behind a tagline. When we reduce patients to medical taglines, we lose not only the opportunity to connect deeply but also the chance to provide care that truly heals. A diagnosis is necessary, but it’s not sufficient – it must be accompanied by an understanding of the individual it describes.
Taglines and medical shorthand both cater to assumptions and quick takes, fostering missed opportunities for connection. Just as a tagline can leave others with a false impression of who we are, a clinical note or diagnosis code can do the same for a patient. Both fail to capture the fullness of the narrative, the depth that lies beneath. It’s a reminder that true healing often requires a willingness to explore the layers of our own narratives, rather than settling for simplistic or surface-level explanations.
Perhaps this is why I find taglines so unsatisfying. As a psychiatrist, I’ve spent years listening to patients’ stories, digging deeper than what’s immediately visible – and encouraging my patients to do the same. Peter Gabriel’s song “Digging in the Dirt” is exactly about that: exploring the hidden layers of our psyche and confronting our fears and trauma. Gabriel explained it as “some hurt that might later affect adult behavior.” Patients’ stories remind us that every person, every life, is more than a headline. The work of both medicine and storytelling is to resist easy reductions and to acknowledge the depth and complexity that make us human.
Does that mean taglines have no value? Not necessarily. They can be useful as starting points, hooks to draw people in. Perhaps that is why the “chief complaint” has persisted for millennia – and why I fell prey to its trappings as a busy first-year resident bouncing from chart to chart in the emergency department.
The chart I picked up had as the chief complaint: “Sore on head.” I pulled back the curtain without bothering to read the history, and I introduced myself, simultaneously scanning the young man’s head. I didn’t see a sore.
“Show me the sore,” I said, drawing the curtain closed. He nonchalantly dropped his pants and pulled down his underwear to show me the sore on his “head.”
“Oh, that head!” The situation called for penicillin – not a bandage.
We must resist the temptation to let our patients’ complaints define them. They are more than a slogan or a sentence. They are more than their clinical signs and symptoms. Who they are unfolds over time, not in a single office visit.
Maybe the challenge isn’t to abandon taglines altogether but to treat them with caution. They’re tools, not truths – ways to open a door, not a final verdict. And for those willing to look beyond their patients’ taglines, there’s always more to discover.
Arthur Lazarus is a former Doximity Fellow, a member of the editorial board of the American Association for Physician Leadership, and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. He is the author of several books on narrative medicine, including Medicine on Fire: A Narrative Travelogue and Story Treasures: Medical Essays and Insights in the Narrative Tradition.
