Thursday Review: “The Long-Term Impact Of A Comprehensive Scholarly Concentration Program In Biomedical Ethics And Medical Humanities”

The authors admit that their article is a first step, but it’s an important first step to take. Writing in BMC Medical Education, Liu and coauthors set out to determine whether biomedical ethics and medical humanities education have any lasting impact on physicians.

Thursday Review: “The Almost Right Word: The Move From Medical to Health Humanities”

Jones et al. start their article with not-so-subtle nod to academic manifestos trying to rename entire disciplines. A clinician friend of one of the authors listened intently to the reasons behind shifting “medical humanities” to “health humanities”. He then replied, Oh, the things you academics worry about… The authors list the good reasons for shifting […]

Thursday Review: “Beyond ‘Dr. Feel-Good’: A Role for the Humanities in Medical Education”

As Dr. Arno K. Kumagai confirms in Academic Medicine, there’s a growing interest in the arts and humanities as a part of medical education. This curriculum, though, is still in its infancy. We know this because faculty and students alike don’t quite know what to do with the humanities.

Thursday Review: “Medical Humanities: Some Uses and Problems”

It’s been said that according to TV, there are only two interesting professions: law enforcement and medicine. Police dramas, mysteries, procedurals, and courtroom shows are nearly limitless. On the other hand, medical shows ranging from melodrama to comedy to documentary are easy to come by. The commercial success and wide range of even fictional stories […]

Story-in-Place, April 11, 2020

Story-in-Place is a workshop to give healthcare providers a forum tell their stories during the COVID-19 crisis. The session will be online on April 11, 2020 at 2pm Pacific. Registration is free. We’re living through a crisis and a profound shared experience. Healthcare providers and related fields are on the front lines. One of the […]

Thursday Review: “Getting Personal: Can Systems Medicine Integrate Scientific and Humanistic Conceptions of the Patient?”

In medicine, just like in other disciplines, there is a distinction between “art” and “science”. A line is drawn between the humanistic and data, between subjective and objective, between mind and body, and what is personal and what is verifiable. In the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice Henrik Vogt et al. want to answer […]

Thursday Review: “Restoring the Patient’s Voice: The Therapeutics of Illness Narratives”

The bulk of my work is wrapped up in teaching how stories can be useful in clinical situations. I believe that stories and storytelling make life better and more meaningful. I tend, though, to downplay narrative work that can’t explicitly help doctors, nurses, and administrators serve patients more effectively. I suppose that comes from a […]

Thursday Review: “Integrating Narrative Medicine into Clinical Care”

This week’s review centers around a brief but meaningful summary of a 2016 pilot to integrate Narrative Medicine into medical students’ clinical rotations. So far, most Thursday Reviews have tried to discover how the authors’ findings support and expand the use of storytelling in medicine. This week, I’d like to do something a little different. […]

Are we sure about the “Humanities” in “Medical Humanities”?

In an article published late last year on the Washington Post’s website, Cathy N. Davidson reported on several studies run by Google’s HR department. The findings were striking: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (“STEM”) ability wasn’t the most important quality in their top employees. It wasn’t even in the top five.