We have been discussing the role of the humanities in medical education, and the need to account for what one of us calls ‘medical paranoia’. By this we mean the tendency that medical students (and practising doctors) have to think that they have developed serious illnesses, making self-diagnoses frequently based on vague suggestions rather than hard evidence. We feel that it is time to reflect on the significance, meaning and potential utility of this phenomenon. more…

In this guest posting, Dr Ravi Shankar tells us how a FAIMAR Fellowship help him to develop and deliver a medical humanities curriculum in Nepal. Ravi writes…

Dr. Badyal, my good friend during my postgraduate residency e-mailed me in late January 2007 informing about a FAIMER fellowship in South Asia. At that time my knowledge and ideas about FAIMER were nebulous. I knew that it was an American organization involved in international medical education. more…

There’s an old adage in medicine that if being with a patient makes you feel depressed then there’s a good chance that person is themselves depressed. So how does this painting make you feel? Depressed, or hopeful? Safe, or vulnerable? Alone, or observed? more…

Helen Garner’s The Spare Room (published by Canongate) is an exploration of the emotional and practical turmoil engendered by caring for someone who is grasping at straws to evade the terminal truth of their illness.

The narrative probes a friendship between two feisty women when it is taken to new levels of intensity by a clash in ideology. Helen (who deliberately shares the author’s name) starts off with noble intentions. She prepares her spare room with due consideration for longstanding-friend Nicola’s feng shui inclinations, hoping to strike just the right balance between practicality and homeliness. Nicola, riven with cancer, is coming to Sydney to spend a small fortune on alternative therapy at the Theodore Institute. Predictably, the Institute proves fantastically adept at sales talk but medically deeply dubious. Nicola emerges from intravenous Vitamin C treatment and ozone cupping weakened and wracked with excruciating pain, but she holds out against morphine until she – and, more particularly, Helen – can bear it no longer. Nicola is coaxed into reengaging with orthodox medicine by her outraged and exhausted friend. more…

Peter Paul Rubens. Helene Fourment in a fur wrap (Het Pelsken). c.1635. Oil on panel, 176x83 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Do you ever really look at your patients? I mean really, really, look, so carefully that you’re in danger of making both of you feel uncomfortable? And if you do, do you look with the eye of a medic, seeking to confirm or rule out certain features, or do you look-as an artist might look- with an innocent eye, open to all possibilities and closed to none? 

If, like me, you take it for granted that artists have always been better than the average person at seeing what’s actually there, rather than what they are expecting to see, then  you might be surprised to read a recent paper in Medical Humanities by Abastado and Chemla which suggests otherwise. 

http://mh.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/2/84 more…

The next issue of MH, to be published in December, will be the first for the new editorial team and so represents a milestone of sorts in the history of the journal. Some of the planned developments will already be evident in this issue, including for instance both an art review and a music review. Others, such as film reviews, will feature for the first time in 2009. Book reviews are always popular and this issue features two that will be of interest to both medical educators and clinicians.

Regular readers may notice that educational research papers are no longer distinguished from other research papers but instead take equal place amongst the wide range of scholarly work featured in the journal. This represents a recognition by the team of the scholarly nature of educational research. It also reflects a desire to end the sometimes inconsistent way in which, in the past, educational papers were variously designated in the journal. more…

I want to bring your attention to this one day symposium on the use of the arts in medical training. The setting for the symposium- the Barts and London- is an inspiration in itself. The format for the day invites the delegates to draw on and share their own experiences and ideas as well as to hear from invited speakers. 

Further information and booking details are available at

http://www.performingmedicine.com/om/season.htm

Medical Humanities

Organised by their student section, this evening will undoubtedly prove one of the highlights of the RSM’s busy programme of events. Publicity material for the meeting promises an opportunity to “explore emotion and communication in a medical setting through theatre”. This enticing and still relatively novel approach to medical educational meetings will hopefully attract both the converts and the curious to what looks likely to be a provocative and lively evening. 

With Nell Dunn, the play’s author, Trevor Walker, the play’s director, TV and news presenter Anna Ford and Jed Mercuio, doctor turned author and screenwriter of TV series ‘Bodies’ taking part in a panel discussion after the staging of two ‘Cancer Tales’, this evening is surely a must for anyone within traveling distance interested in finding out what incorporating the arts and humanities into medical education means in action. more…

In this posting, Nepalese medical educator and MH Editorial Advisory Board Member, Ravi Shankar, describes the educational background of students entering medical school in South Asia.

more…