The Selectives
Mandatory for all students in the M1 and M2 classes
The Selectives in the Medical Humanities are intended to foster the development of creative, empathic, and intellectually adaptable physicians who are capable of using both the right and left hemispheres of their brain. Intentionally designed to provide students with opportunities to strengthen problem-solving skills, express a sense of creativity, and to consider various perspectives, these courses will support students on the journey to becoming a well-rounded physician with a strong background in both the arts and the sciences.
Employing the arts and the humanities serves multiple purposes:
- The first is to create physicians who can develop a tolerance for ambiguity, a trait so needed in clinical practice.
- Second, encountering the experiences of others via the surrogate means of literature, fine art, film, philosophy, etc. allows students to empathize with their patients and colleagues.
- Third, wisdom is a key feature in decision-making and there are few aspects of a physician more important than possessing the ability to make truly wise decisions. Over the course of our short lives, we may not acquire all the experiences necessary to become wise in and of ourselves but the knowledge accrued in 40,000 years of recorded history provides us a window to the experiences of all those who have gone before us.
- Fourth, being able to access and develop a different aspect of cognition facilitates problem-solving and creativity in multiple arenas.
Physicians with a humanities background have been noted to surpass their colleagues with backgrounds solely in science – even if they do struggle more in the beginning of their training. Musicians (and Albert Einstein) have been noted to have a larger corpus callosum, and right/left brain communication is a hallmark of flexible, “out-of-the-box” thinkers. Developing our interests outside of pure information acquisition expands our horizons, providing a buffer to the burnout that many in the medical field face, while also encouraging a sense of personal fulfillment.
Course Descriptions
Selectives are offered on a rotating basis. The selectives will consist of six sessions over a semester which will run the fall and spring of each year although different courses may be available during the fall and spring. While most will meet on Friday afternoons from around 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., expansion of the humanities curriculum has allowed the opening of additional time slots. All selectives require approximately the same time commitment.
Select a course below to read the full course description.
This course will introduce the humanities in medicine through the exploration of emotional intelligence. Students will be presented with an overview of the origins of the theory of emotional intelligence, learn about the two leading models of emotional intelligence and explore the role of emotional intelligence in leadership, teamwork and empathy. The course will involve independent student activities and group activites during the course sessions. The course directors are available to consult with students during the regular school day by appointment or via email.
In 1983, Howard Gardner introduced the idea that traditional types of intelligence, such as IQ, fail to fully explain cognitive ability. He posited that multiple intelligences included both interpersonal intelligence (the capacity to understand the intentions, motivations and desires of other people) and intrapersonal intelligence (the capacity to understand oneself, to appreciate one's feelings, fears and motivations).
In 1990, Mayer & Salovey described emotional intelligence as, "the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions." This model, which expanded with the addition of Davied Caruso, to an EI blueprint of perceiving emotion, using emotion, understanding emotion and managing emotion.
In 1995 Daniel Goleman adapted the model to leadership in the business environment in a groundbreaking article in the Harvard Business Review. Goleman organized the model into the the categories of personal and social competencies.
Literature on EI in medical students theorizes that self-aware students are able to assess both their emotions and their skills, and that students who successfully self-manage are able to recognize and use their emotions, both positive and negative, to control their environments and outcomes. Empathy, understanding and responding to the emotional needs of others, is a subscale of emotional intelligence that is highly relevant in the work of all healthcare professionals.
Mindfulness is often defined as awareness of the present moment without judgment. Everyone has the natural ability to be mindful, and with practice that natural ability grows stronger. Research has shown that greater mindfulness is associated with better mental health, better physical health, and better daily functioning and quality of life for students, healthcare providers, and patients alike. The core qualities of mindfulness – attention, awareness, acceptance, and compassion – can be cultivated through meditation, and mindfulness training is increasingly offered as part of medical school and residency to promote “mindful practice” in healthcare (Epstein 1999, JAMA; Epstein 2017, Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness, and Humanity). This course provides an introduction to what mindfulness is, the most common types of mindfulness meditation, evidence-based mindfulness interventions, and the biological and behavioral mechanisms that explain how mindfulness works to reduce stress and anxiety, and improve mental and physical health. The course covers landmark scientific studies, includes guided instruction in a variety of mindfulness meditation exercises, and through inquiry and dialogue empowers students to discover what “mindful practice” means to them.
We will explore:
- How to define mindfulness and “mindful practice” in medicine
- Mindfulness Meditation (MM) as one way to increase mindfulness
- Health-related outcomes associated with MM, including mental health, physical health, health behaviors, and cognitive functioning
- Key elements of MM practice
- Biological mechanisms underlying MM, including neural, physiological, immune, and genomic changes
- Diversity, equity and inclusion issues related to mindfulness and mindfulness-based interventions
- Clinical implications and healthcare applications of popular mindfulness training programs
Students will also have the opportunity to practice MM during each class session guided by expert teachers who provide free recordings of their classes on the internet.
This course will introduce social science and humanities through an exploration of the physician-patient clinical encounter. In this course, we examine the clinical encounter in which participants bring their own, and often differing definitions of the situation.
Medical educators have struggled to maintain and improve the empathy and compassion of their students. Research suggests they diminishes with each year of training, but especially with the start of clinical training. Both the physician and the patient seek the essential competence and caring in the encounter, i.e. treatment and healing. How¬ever, how the physician and patient each understand and interact on the expectations of competence and empathy is a product of differing definitions of the situation, specifically emanating from their respective defini¬tions of embodiment. The physician’s sense of embodiment, a product of medical training, is often labeled the “biomedical model’ or “medicalized body.” At the same time, the patient brings a sense of embodiment best understood as “the lived-body.” The lived-body, as the name suggests, is an interpretative product of the interaction between biology, psychosocial and sociocultural experiences of daily living of each person. These two views of embodiment generate differing understandings of what constitutes disease and illness that the physician and patient bring to the clinical encounter. This dilemma is exacerbated by the relational asymmetry of power, knowledge and privilege between the physician and patient which serves to impede the development of trustworthiness in clinical encounters.
We discuss the notion of the “working personality” of the physician. The working personality of the physician is a socially constructed understanding of the nature of the work; its dictates, required skills and knowledge, clinical experience and ethics focused on the physician’s worksite, i.e., the human body as contextualized by the profession’s application of the biomedical model. We examine the nature of the worksite to understand the components of the physician’s working personality. The patient’s sense of embodiment is conceptualized as the existential self, the lived-body which is theorized as a non-Cartesian holistic notion. These two views of embodiment generate differing expectations during the physician-patient encounter. We delineate these differing expectations, i.e., treating and healing, in an attempt to better understand the relational deficits such as empathy and compassion in clinical encounters. The course draws on the psycho-social, cultural and philosophical aspects of embodiment and professionalism. Additionally it draws on the instructor’s training in relational therapy.
The “Social Determinants of Health” (SDH) offers a perspective on health and illness that departs from a commonly-held view that health exists in the absence of disease, while disease is reduced to a deviation from “normal” biological conditions. In contrast, the SDH perspective views health and illness as the product of social conditions that foster or discourage individual or collective well-being. Fundamentally it asks how access to social resources – e.g., jobs, income, education, housing, connections, status – affects health and illness. The SDH perspective alerts us to everyday social realities that shape the health and illness of individuals, communities, and populations. Understanding these realities can enhance the effectiveness of health professionals in their roles as clinicians and as concerned citizens.
This course relies on videos, readings, statistics, powerpoints, and other tools to help inform students about how diverse social conditions shape health and illness, and to stimulate engagement and discussion of the SDH perspective and how it may apply to everyday practice.