Press Release,
July 21, 2013
International Journal of the Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice
Creative Arts in Humane Medicine
Book touches the heart of what it is to be human
Cheryl L. McLean
Creative Arts in Humane Medicine, Editor, Cheryl L. McLean, Published by Brush Education, and distributed by The University of Toronto Press, is a resource book for medical
educators, practitioners and students as well as those in the allied health
professions who wish to learn how the arts can contribute toward a more caring
and empathic approach to medicine.
In this collection,
which features the latest research and real life examples, physicians, medical
educators, researchers and allied health professionals, as well as medical
students, residents, artists and others across Canada, the United States,
United Kingdom and Australia show how the arts in action can contribute toward
humane medicine.
To be
humane is to show empathy or understanding and to care about the condition and
suffering of others, to treat others as we ourselves might wish to be
treated. The word medicine itself is
from the Latin “ars medicina” refers to the art of healing, the practice
invested in the treatment and prevention of illness. Humanistic Medicine is a
growing trend today as more medical professionals integrate the arts into their
practice to improve communication with their patients and build better
relationships. A recent study found that
over half of all medical schools in The United States involved the arts in some form in learning
activities(Rodenhauser, Strickland, & Gambala).This survey showed that the
arts are used to foster student well-being, enhance teaching and learning, and
improve clinical and relational skills,for example, observation and diagnostic
skills, reflection and insight.
There
are other encouraging signs that the arts are alive and thriving in medical
education today with programs integrating the arts and humanities into medical
education and leading medical schools and universities offering more
programming to promote creative and scholarly work at the intersections of the
arts, humanities and medicine. One
Canadian effort, the Medical Humanities HEALS Program at The Faculty of
Medicine, Dalhousie University, offers programming in visual parts, performing
arts, the history of medicine and creative writing. Another, The Arts and Humanities in Health
and Medicine Program at The Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at The University
of Alberta, launched in May 2006, has a mandate to balance scientific knowledge
and compassionate care. Its mission
statement formally acknowledges “the explicit recognition within the Faculty
that clinical practice is both an art and a science”. At The University of Toronto, the
Undergraduate Medical Education (UME) program, has begun to integrate different types of
narrative systematically into the curriculum with a new companion curriculum.
At
Yale School of Medicine, The Yale Medical Humanities and the Arts Council
reports it is committed to fostering the use of the humanities, social
sciences, and the arts as a lens for examining issues in health, medicine, and
healing. Arts and Humanities at Harvard Medical School aim to promote the role of the humanities in medical
education, clinical care and research. Stanford
School of Medicine, Arts, Humanities and Medicine, has
been established to promote creative and scholarly work at the intersections
between the arts, humanities and medicine.
And there
is growing support for the creative arts in humane medicine today coming from
the medical students themselves. The
AMSA (American Medical Students' Association) has over 150 chapters in
medical schools across the United States and an estimated 350 pre-med
chapters. Aliye Runyan M.D., Education and Research Fellow, American
Medical Student Association, reports , The AMSA Medical Humanities Scholars' Program exposes
students to lead faculty in narrative medicine, humanities and the arts as they
explore reflective capacity, communication, self care and the art of listening
to their patients' stories. "AMSA," Runyan
writes, “believes it is paramount that the physician not only be a scientist
but a humanist, a communicator and an advocate.”
I was
recently a guest presenter for a webinar for The American Medical Student
Association’s Medical Humanities Scholars’ Program. During the session a student asked, “If this
work (about the creative arts in medicine) is frequently about empathy and
feeling the human story, how much empathy is too much empathy? What if I can no longer bear it?” The student
asked me a very difficult question, one not easy to answer. Our creative work is powerful and profound in
the way it frequently uses all the senses to foster empathy and draw us closer to human understanding, but
what are our human limits? If I were in bed, ill and fighting for life,
I asked myself, how much empathy would I hope my caregivers would extend to
me? When would enough be enough? This collection raises provocative questions
and proposes alternative approaches in
the hopes of inspiring new areas of investigation while opening up a larger
conversation about the creative arts in medicine among students and medical
practitioners.
The
book, Creative Arts in Humane Medicine
has been divided into four distinct and related sections. Section
1, “Educating for Empathy through the Arts”; Section 2, "The Arts in Medicine and Practitioner Self Care" ; Section 3, "Navigating with Narrative
Through Life Experience" ; and Section 4,"
The Creative Arts in Action for Change in Health".
Section l, Educating for Empathy through the Arts, opens with special attention paid to
the overriding theme in this collection, that of care and fostering empathy through varied arts
methodologies. We begin our book with visual art
as the focus as Andre Smith and his research team at The Department of
Sociology, University of Victoria, demonstrate an innovative pedagogical
approach using fabric art for teaching empathy with end-of-life health care
providers. Similarly, in my own article
that follows, I share the process of creating an ethnodrama to raise awareness
about aging, mental health and autonomy and discuss how writing and creating a
performance based on research led to greater empathy and human
understanding. In his opening essay, Craig Chen MD, an anesthesiology
resident at Stanford University Medical Centre, supports the view that the arts
and humanities can bring about understanding about illness and disease. He explains,
“It is not easy to go to work every day and
care for people who hurt themselves, are going to die, cry on your shoulder,
feel terrified or distrust the health care system…The arts and humanities, with
respect to medicine, are about understanding how humans experience illness and
disease and placing that within a context of diagnosis, treatment and care”.
The section’s closing paper by researchers Mina
Borromeo, Heather Gaunt and Neville Chiavaroli, from the Melbourne Dental School,
explores the visual arts used in education for increasing observational skills
and understanding as students are guided through the rediscovery and
re-appreciation of human responses as it
applies to Special Needs Dentistry.
In Section 2,
The Arts in Medicine and Practitioner Self Care, we examine working in medicine and the realities of illness, disease, aging, death and after death and how
the arts can offer healthy opportunities for practitioners to deal with stressful situations while addressing their own
self care needs. Alim Nagi MD, who is also an actor, producer and writer, stresses
that teaching people to understand their patients stories must begin early in
their training before the erosion of empathy.
Nagi believes using theatre in medical education for “performative
reflection” can help students delve into the character’s back stories drawing
parallels between those experiences and their own. In the article that follows, Maura McIntyre’s
arts informed research, part of the growing genre of performance ethnography, offers
caregivers and others an opportunity to participate in reader’s theatre so that
they might experience real stories of nursing home life. Craig Chen MD informs us about the importance
of providing health professionals and others a place for self expression
through varied forms of performance.
At Stanford, medical
students had a vital opportunity for expression and community connection
through performance while audiences learned more
about what it is like to work in the field of anesthesiology. In the next article, Rachael Allen, an
Artist in Residence (AIR) at university anatomy and clinical skills
laboratories in the North East of England, writes about her work witnessing students engaged in lab work with prepared
prosections of embalmed and plastinated specimens and believes it is
fundamentally important for health and humane medicine that students working in
anatomy labs are offered opportunities to express these intimate human
encounters through art. Allen offers new and sensory approaches to anatomy and
clinical studies while artistically rendering the undergraduate experiences of
medical students. Forms of art therapy and varied modalities for healing are also discussed. Music therapy has long
been recognized as being effective for self expression and healing and, as Amy
Clements-Cortes demonstrates in her article, music therapy in many forms can
also help address stress and other issues for those working in palliative care
settings. In other programs expressive approaches have also proven useful for
healthcare practitioners as is presented in the article by Diane
Kaufman, MD and her team at The
University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
Contributors present personal stories and engage with narrative in Section 3, Navigating with Narrative Through Life Experience, as
well as demonstrating the applications of literature in medical practice. Dr. Rita Charon, a leader in the field of narrative
medicine, has long advocated for the use
of the narrative in medical education.
Each of our contributors navigate with narrative or use story in
uniquely different ways, however, all writers in this section share in common
an underlying belief about the humanity and dignity that can be found through
fostering the practitioner patient relationship. Jasna Schwind, a nurse educator, writes about her
work, informed by narrative inquiry while sharing aspects of her own illness
story to demonstrate how intentional and thoughtful reflection allowed her, as
both patient and caregiver, to make sense of the experience. Narrative and
poetic inquirier, John J. Guiney Yallop, writes in the article that follows, about his
lived experiences over time with medical practitioners and, in so doing, poignantly
illustrates the importance of the relationship between practitioner and patient. Catherine
L. Mah, MD, FRCPC, PhD a scientist, practitioner, researcher, and teacher
discusses in her article the uses of literature and the childhood novel in pediatrics
practice suggesting the approach may
help establish a foundation for
narrative examination in the one on one interview.
In Section 4, The Creative Arts in Action for Change in Health we embrace change and the future
opening with an exploration by Louise Younie, a Clinical Senior Lecturer, Barts and The
London School of Medicine and Dentistry, who writes about her journey of
discovery through arts based inquiry and considers the transformative
influences of the arts in medical education as well as within her
own work. In the next chapter Canadian activist artists Carol Conde and Karl
Beveridge are featured demonstrating the arts in action for change and the
power of story and photography to touch people and advocate for humanity for
those who work in healthcare settings. Bandy
X. Lee MD at Yale University believes that today there is a great need for
collective and emotional healing. She reports The World Health Organization has
noted that health is not just the absence of disease and, in terms of change,
effective violence prevention may be the key to health and human flourishing
and creativity. Louise Terry PhD PGCHE LLB
illustrates how digital stories and technology can help teach ethics and law to
health and social service professionals while contributing to humane
medicine. Visual
and audio technologies, she suggests, help realize and bring to life our human
stories complete with actions, omissions, aspirations and values.
Our chapter
closes with an exhibit from the heart as medical and fine arts students from
The University of British Columbia, Canada, reach out and build bridges to
understanding health and the heart while connecting to communities through the
visual arts.
This is
an educational book in which, through
creative processes, we feel the human
story, touching the heart of what it is to be
human in others while attentively loving and caring for ourselves…not
only surviving but thriving as humane practitioners in our lives and work. I invite you, through this book to read, to engage and to actively learn
through these chapters about the creative arts in humane medicine. I believe you will find, in keeping with the embodied
nature of our field, each article unfolds in its way as a story, a revealing
performance about life, a creative act within itself.
The book, Creative Arts in Humane Medicine will be released in November 2013 and can be ordered through Brush Education.
More information ijcaip@gmail.com
Presentations about this book can be arranged at ijcaip@gmail.com
