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Importance of education in healthcare
Importance of education in healthcare
Importance of medical education
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As a medical professional, there are many different aspects of the job. Most of the journey towards the profession is filled with long hours of studying all the technical terms and symptoms for a diagnosis. While all these aspects are important, humanities and fine arts aspect of learning should be incorporated into the studies of the current and future healthcare professionals as well. Literature and art impact and improve many different aspects of improving one’s skills as a carer, including, ethics, self-reflection, aesthetics and interpretation, empathy, and ambiguity. All parts of these aspects are interconnected with one another, with one aspect also enhancing the others, however, I believe the most important aspects are the ethics, empathy, and ambiguity that in which studying literature and art can provide for the learning healthcare provider. There is no doubt that …show more content…
Life is ambiguous, and this also applies in the medical field. Physicians must know how the ambiguity of life and unexpected situations may arise in medicine and the ability to understand different paths to take and the fact that different outcomes may occur other than that which was hypothesized. Literature and art help us learn to tolerate ambiguity: questions or problems for which there is not a single “right” answer. Literature and the arts are inherently ambiguous in nature, and it would be beneficial to a physician to study literature and fine arts to improve their understanding that not all things are going to turn out as we expect them to, and that not all things are what they seem to appear to be. Example of life not going to plan can be found in literature in both “Am I Going Blind?” by Frank Bruni and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. In both of these texts, life doesn’t go as planned and both protagonists have to learn to take a different road in life that they were not expecting to
The writing style of the author is quite interesting to me. Atul Gawande’s honesty, a major aspect of his writing style, beautifully highlights the good and bad of any medical profession. For example, Gawande’s argument over the use of patients for resident training
This requires respect and compassion and prioritizing their comfort and values. I believe that as future physicians, we must be open to the different identities and perspectives of each individual in order to try to understand their beliefs and concerns. This level of empathy allows us to connect with patients on a deeper level and treat them with better quality care. Given this, I was immediately drawn to Georgetown’s Literature and Medicine program. Having taken a similarly named course during my undergraduate career, I recognize how literature, fiction or non-fiction, can create a compelling narrative that draws us into the mind of the writer and the characters. Medically related narratives raise issues that we will be confronted with later on in our careers, such as the respective responsibilities of the patient and physician, the role of medical ethics, and the value of compassion and empathy. This program will help me to become a more reflective and empathetic individual that places the beliefs and comfort of the patient at the forefront of my professional practice, and can competently cater to the needs of a diverse
In his encounter with a young boy, Lee Tran, who suffered from a tumor compressing his airway which obstructed his ability to breathe, Gawande discusses the sheer luck that resulted in Lee’s “tumor [shifting] rightward, [allowing] airways to both lungs to open up,” as the conflicted doctors did not pursue the safest course of treatment (Gawande 6). This anecdote validates the fact that often doctors cannot foresee the optimal course of action through the smoke of crisis and relied on essentially random chance to save the young boy’s life. Gawande sums up this experience as he admits that while there is science in the profession, there also exists “habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing” (Gawande 7) - rendering the science imperfect. These qualities - habit, intuition, and “plain old guessing” are not empirical qualities proven through the scientific method but rather unquantifiable, refuting the stereotypes conferred by the myth of an infallible science and revealing the medicine is ultimately a human
Art impacts every person, in all environments, by embracing all possible benefits across all mediums. Art enables the collaboration between the work and the medical laboratory professional and brings it to the patients they help to diagnose. Artistic processes can offer both the patient and the diagnostic team an avenue to improve communications regarding infectious diseases with art, improving health and healthcare. Important elements of collaborating ideas are to note whether they are entirely experimental, entirely conceptual, or somewhere in the middle. Experiences in modern art are consistent with the middle area of collaboration amongst all artistic processes. The core group of famous Impressionists - Monet, Picasso,
“As physicians have always their instruments and knives ready for cases which suddenly require their skill, so do you have principles ready for the understanding of things divine and human, and for doing everything, even the smallest, while remembering the bond which unites the divine and human to one another. For you will not do anything well affecting humans without at the same time referring to things divine; or the contrary.”
Patients have long lamented that their doctors do not truly listen to them. A new emerging discipline, Narrative Medicine, seeks to rectify this problem by teaching both medical students and doctors alike the value of empathy and through the use of literature how to listen, dissect, and reconstruct patient’s narratives. Although Rebecca Elizabeth Garden and Rita Charon, agree on many aspects of Narrative Medicine, Garden tends be more critical and points out more flaws in her work entitled “The Problem of Empathy: Medicine and the Humanities,” whereas Charon cites the numerous benefits of Narrative Medicine in “Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness.” Although Narrative Medicine is beneficial because it allows doctors to develop empathy, one should also realize the many potential pitfalls and complications that arises.
Does your head hurt, does your body ache, and how are your bowl movements? After a head to toe assessments, touching and prodding, the physician writes up a prescription and explains in a medical jargon the treatment plan. As the short consultation comes to a close, it’s wrapped up with the routine “Please schedule an appointment if there are no signs of improvement”. This specific experience often leaves the patient feeling the “medical gaze” of the physicians. Defined by good and good, the medical gaze is the physicians mentality of objectifying their patient to nothing more than a biological entity. Therefore it is believed that the medical gaze moves away from compassionate and empathetic care, thus leaving patients feeling disconnected from their physicians. In order to understand how the medical gaze has stemmed into patient care, I begin with observations of a Grand Round, lectures for the progress of continuing medical education of physicians. There are expectations of physicians to be informed of cutting edge medical procedures and biotechnology since it can result in a less aggressive and more efficient treatment plan of patients. As I witness the resident physician’s maturation of medical competence in during a Surgical Grand Round at UC Irvine Medical Center, it has shifted the paradigm of the medical gaze and explains how competence is a form of compassion and empathy in patient care.
According to Philipus Auredous Paracelsus, “medicine is not merely a science but an art. The character of the physician may act more powerfully upon the patient than the drugs employed”.
Defining ambiguity tolerance is complex. Chappelle and Roberts (1986) define ambiguity tolerance as “a person’s ability to function rationally and calmly in a situation in which interpretation of all stimuli is not clear” (p.30). Tolerant people are better able to tolerate the feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. They will perceive and interpret ambiguous situations more adequately, in a realistic way, without denying or distorting parts of its complexity. Tolerant people are likely to elaborate more adaptive and better coordinated behavior. They can withstand the discomfort of the ambiguous situation long enough as to accommodate and generate a more appropriate and flexible response to it. It was concluded that tolerant individuals should
The way that each individual interprets, retrieves, and responds to the information in the world that surrounds you is known as perception. It is a personal way of creating opinions about others and ourselves in everyday life and being able to recognize it under various conditions. Each person’s perceptions are used as a kind of filter that every piece of information has to pass through before it determines the effect that it has or will have on the person from the stimulus. It is convincing to believe that we create multiple perceptions about different situations and objects each day. Perceptions reflect our opinions in many ways. The quality of a person’s perceptions is very important and can affect the response that is given through different situations. Perception is often deceived as reality. “Through perception, people process information inputs into responses involving feelings and action.” (Schermerhorn, et al.; p. 3). Perception can be influenced by a person’s personality, values, or experiences which, in turn, can play little role in reality. People make sense of the world that they perceive because the visual system makes practical explanations of the information that the eyes pick up.
I aim to explore the different art forms observing their attributes to a therapeutic environment. Through investigating our ability to create imagery, I hope to discover how artist media can help to communicate and clarify feelings and emotions in a safe setting. Employing a method of analogy, I aim to unfold the concept of fantasy. Identifying fantasy as an opportunity to be more exploratory with imagery in a productive manner and not as a form of escape or retreat from reality.
One of the disadvantages of art therapy is that the therapist is more vulnerable to misinterpretation in terms of the objective understanding of content. Care must be taken not to make rapid interpretations on the specific piece of art which might prevent or even deny the client the satisfaction of discovering and finding out for herself (Case and Dalley, p. 65). This is because art therapy involves a lot of interpretation, it is understandable that critics about this technique are similar to that of psychotherapy. The client’s images can come across as many things with contrasting ideas, but only the individual themself can explain it. The therapist is urged not to point out obvious red signals, instead they should allow the client to come up with their own interpretations. Their own interpretations alone are something to make note of as it may shed some light on the client's thought process about the
R. Howard Bloch once stated, “The humanities are an incredible source of practical information about the world around us”. The study of humanities has affected the life of every individual to walk the earth at some point in time; It seems sort of outrageous but it’s true. From art and literature to architecture and music, the humanities is present in our everyday lives. Its importance is often underestimated but in reality, it is extremely important to our existence. In fact, before entering my first humanities class I didn’t realize how important or interesting humanities was. After learning about how art, specifically, has changed over time, I find myself eager to learn more. The benefits of studying humanities includes: aiding individuals
In order to understand the importance of self-reflection of physicians, we have to address the problem of modern American medicine first. In the book, Dr. Chen first focuses on the transformation of medical students after encountering death: the cadaver dissection, resuscitation on a dying patient, and the process of pronouncing the death of a patient (Chen, 2007). These is...
2.5 Pragmatic Ambiguity: Pragmatic ambiguity refers to a situation where the context of a phrase gives it multiple