White Coat Black Art CBC, Stories Will be Missed

posted by: Cheryl McLean
Canadian Creative Arts in Health, Training and Education Journal

Unfortunate news about the CBC programme "White Coat Black Art" hosted by Dr. Brian Goldman. From what I read, it looks like the show has been cancelled. I have posted about this show before and linked to a podcast interview with Goldman and "Dr. Cunningham" who spoke
about alcoholism, "the God complex" and his own spirituality. Hear podcast with Dr. Cunningham

Recently the show focussed on end of life issues and physician/patient communication.

As described, the programme, " explores the tension between hope and reality: between what patients want, and what doctors can deliver. Doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals explain how the system works, and why, with a refreshing and unprecedented level of honesty."

If you haven't had an opportunity to catch the programme the podcasts are still available at the CBC website.

If you like what you hear send an email to the CBC encouraging them to continue the programme "White Coat Black Art" again in the future.

Wishing "White Coat, Black Art" a quick return to the airwaves.

C. McLean.

Digital Ethnography Thinking About the Future of Student Learning

Continuing on again in our thread about technology, community,democracy and new forms of idea sharing.....
Such creative work and progressive communication I believe is very much related to the relative health of our educational systems and our society.

The video "A Vision of Students Today" is an example of digital ethnography created by Michael Wesch Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology along with the 200 students enrolled in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University in Spring 2007. According to Wesch, the project began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future. Students wrote the script, and made suggestions for survey questions to ask the entire class. The survey was administered the following week.
Wesch then took all of the information from the survey and organized it into the final script portrayed in the video which was filmed over one 75 minute class period.
The introduction was filmed a month later. It is inspired by Marshall McLuhan's ideas as they apply to education.
(edited for this blog, source "Digital Ethnography, Kansas State University at:


http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/

SEE the video project "A Vision of Students Today at Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

Sweet Music to Patients' Ears, Musicians Help Physicians Tune in to Patients at University of Western Ontario, Schulich School of Medicine

Music and medicine is in the news today at The University of Western Ontario this Tuesday, April 15, with London Free Press reporter John Miner's article, "Sweet Music to Patients' Ears." Miner reports that James McKay, Professor at the Don Wright Faculty of Music, brought music students to the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry to help train medical students how to listen to their patients.

In the article, Dr. Terri Paul, Assistant Professor at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry explains,

"We physicians tend to talk a lot and talk quickly, and usually interrupt patients within about 18 seconds of them starting to tell us their story. This is learning to sit back and listen. It's also about learning to read patients' non-verbal signals."

Dr. Terri Paul

(A recent report on health literacy from the Canadian Public Health Association, found communication between doctors and patients wasn’t as effective as it could be. Western’s Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry and The Don Wright Faculty of Music teamed up to provide medical students with ways to improve their lines of communication. “The Sound of Silence: Developing Effective Patient Partnerships” was one of a series of lectures given by Professors in Music and Medicine which focused on listening and speaking with patients as equal partners and illustrated the skills that musicians use playing in a small group to communicate both verbally and non-verbally. )
source: http://www.schulich.uwo.ca/news/index.php?article=000439


I have published posts about a number of programmes in Canada that use the arts in medical education. This is yet another indication that the arts in many forms when applied in education and training can help increase sensitivity and understanding in the physician, patient relationship. CM

Stories by William Carlos Williams featured in Reader's Theatre

Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine Program

Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Alberta

Medical Readers’ Theater promotes discussion of issues related to the doctor/ patient relationship, and social, ethical, and other humanities-based aspects of medicine.

Upcoming Performance:

A Face of Stone
By William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

Cast of Characters:
Narrator: Dr. Lisa Steblecki
Doctor: Dr. Ron Damant
Man: Peter Gill (Med 2010)
Woman: Sangeeta Jain (Class 2010)

Discussion Leader:
Dr. Verna Yiu

Tuesday, October 30, 2007
4:00 – 5:00 pm
Classroom D, 2F1.04 WMC

All are welcome!!!!

William Carlos Williams, a world-renowned poet (many will know his famous poem, "The Red Wheelbarrow"), also practiced medicine for 50 years among the working-class citizens of Rutherford, New Jersey, and wrote a number of short stories that used his experience in medicine to explore the lives of physicians and their patients. In this play a physician takes an instant dislike to a young immigrant couple who bring their infant to the office for a checkup. The story tracks the evolution of this initially poor physician/ patient relationship.
Many thanks to Todd L. Savitt, author of "Medical Readers' Theatre: A Guide and Scripts," for sharing his experiences of coordinating the East Carolina University's Medical Readers' Theatre Program with us.

Pamela Brett-MacLean, PhD
Co-Director, Arts & Humanities in Health & Medicine Program
Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry,
2-74 Zeidler Ledcor CentreEdmonton, AB Canada T6G 2X8Tel: (780) 492-0980 / Fax: (780) 492-5487 / Cell: (780) 708-3133
http://www.med.ualberta.ca/education/ahhm.cfm

... we need the arts to "absorb the new knowledge of the sciences and assimilate it to human needs, color it with human passions, transform it into the blood and bone of human nature." (... from Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Defense of Poetry")

Humanities Scholar Helps Create Change Offers Thoughts on Digital Scholarship

"What is the value – to the humanities and to society – of more open scholarly communication? Open access removes barriers. I find this very politically attractive. The sharing of knowledge it allows helps us get at economic inequities – experienced both by smaller academic institutions and, of course, by developing countries. Everybody wins. More access and resource sharing lead to a democratized diffusion of knowledge. "
Linda Hutcheon Ph.D.

Quote from "Create Change" Thoughts on Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Article Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto
Go to Source for full article:
http://www.createchange.org/cases/humanities.html


See "Crossing Borders" blog summary article by Linda Hutcheon, Ph.D., Michael Hutcheon M.D.
from CCAHTE Journal
"Medicine and Arts the Teachings of Opera"
http://ccahtecrossingborders.blogspot.com/2007/05/if-we-accept-premise-that-medical.html

Medicine, Art and Education/ Narrative Medicine, Poetry in Medical Education Offers a Place for Expression and Healing

Photo C. McLean

Narrative in Education and Practice at McGill Medical School

Maureen Rappaport MD FCCFP is a family doctor who splits her time between working in a busy community practice in Montreal, Quebec and teaching family medicine residents and medical students. She is also a writer of short stories and poetry mainly about caring for older persons and dying patients.

She believes in a balanced medical education that offers a place for the development of the mind as well as the nurturing of soul. "...We (our medical schools) have been criticized for a failure of heart, for lacking in the art of practice. Reading and writing short stories and poetry in a supportive group setting is one way for some students to discover what is in their hearts and to remember why they went into medicine."


Maureen Rappaport offers a creative writing course as an elective to fourth year medical
students at McGill University called "The Poetry of Practice." Students meet for two and a half hours twice a week for four weeks to read, write and discuss medical literature radically different from what is found in medical textbooks, clinical case notes and scientific journals.

She reports, "One cannot watch death and suffering and not be touched, but these feelings are hard to express, hard to articulate and many times impossible to acknowledge as students
run around the hospital not quite sure of what they're supposed to do as student doctors. For those who can access it poetry offers a language to express the inexpressible. ...For those who wrote, shared and listened in this context ..moments of bearing witness became medical acts. "
"The students in the two years I've held this course told me verbally and in written evaluations they found the course healing, a stress relieving activity, meaningful and a way to maintain
a sense of humanity, a way to resolve conflict and disturbing feelings and a wonderful way to bond with classmates and feel less alone about common experiences."

Medicine and Arts, The Teachings of Opera in Health and Education

"If we accept the premise that medical practice occurs within a larger cultural context, then it is a short step to the realization that the larger cultural context is going to inform and influence the understanding of disease and those
who suffer from it-inside and outside medical circles-"

About "Medicine in/as Culture:
The Teachings of Opera"
by Michael Hutcheon MD ,
Linda Hutcheon, Ph.D.

Dr. Michael Hutcheon, Professor of Medicine and Deputy Physician-in-Chief for Education at the University Health Network and Linda Hutcheon Ph.D., Professor of English and Comparative Literature, work collaboratively across disciplines at the intersections of medicine and culture ..theirs is truly a marriage of medicine and the arts. In a recent article in CCAHTE Journal Michael and Linda Hutcheon wrote about opera and its potential applications in medical education.


"...opera offers medical insights not only through its revealing cultural representations. The actual experience of watching and listening to opera with its determined combination of verbal narrative, powerful music and dramatic performance is an intense one. Opera directly and movingly deals with themes ranging from the terror of death...to the longing for death (in Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde)..."

"..in educational terms studying this high impact kind of story in a medical setting not only teaches empathy and sympathy with the dying and the bereaved but is also helping those in the healing arts to come to terms with their own inevitable end."
"..our modern narratives of science and technology can only
go so far in teaching us about the death we must all finally face."

Quotes from the article Medicine in/as Culture,
The Teachings of Opera by Michael Hutcheon, MD and
Linda Hutcheon, Ph.D. , in CCAHTE Journal, March 07
Access complete March edition of CCAHTE
The Canadian Creative Arts in Health, Training and Education Journal at
http://www.cmclean.com




Michael and Linda Hutcheon have published a
number of articles and three books, Opera: Desire, Disease, Death,
Bodily Charm: Living Opera, and Opera: The Art of Dying
see website http://individual.utoronto.ca/hutcheons/books.html


Access the full article and complete CCAHTE Journal March 07 issue free at http://www.cmclean.com subscribe to CCAHTE journal free with an email ccahte@cmclean.com "please subscribe"

I thought you might appreciate watching and listening to this youtube video
Robert Alagna and Leontina Vaduva (La Boheme)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNSyvPN7EPQ

Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolade (final scene, orchestra) with Leonard Bernstein conducting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XlmJtnzwkY



"Few art forms are as thoroughly dependent as is tragic opera upon desire, suffering and death as narrative and emotional staples. The body..the live singing body...on stage gives voice to the drama of the suffering person."
Michael Hutcheon M.D. and Linda Hutcheon Ph.D.

News from Health Care Technology and Place CIHR Strategic Research and Training Program HCTP, University of Toronto

http://www.hctp.utoronto.ca/AboutUs.asp

These are just a few of the arts/science and

creativity related events just

in from Sandra Knol,Healthcare, Technology

and Place, CIHR Strategic Research and Training Program (HCTP),

University of Toronto

1. in situ: art/body/medicine - 10th Annual Subtle Technologies Festival

2. The Creativity Conversation

in situ: art/body/medicine- 10th Annual Subtle Technologies Festival

Date: May 24 – 27, 2007

Location: Various activities presented across the University of Toronto

Festival Abstract: For the 10th Anniversary Festival, Subtle Technologies presents practitioners of arts, sciences and medicines, and those who study their context, historians, ethicists, and other critical thinkers to contemplate how these disciplines can work together and reshape perspectives on the body. As scientific and technological breakthroughs prominently occupy our culture, we ask where the boundaries are. We are interested in investigating how we relate bodies in situ: as parts, as a whole, as systems; how we identify, map, modify, protect, violate, and heal. Explore our diverse program which includes symposia, exhibitions, a workshop, and performances.
HCTP Mentors and Fellow Art Installations
Jack Butler (Mentor): Fatemaps: Would You Like To Know What Will Happen? and Genital Embryogenesis
Monir Moniruzzaman (Fellow): Rough Cut
David Theodore (Mentor), Curator: Children and Youth Picture SickKids Hospital Photo Exhibition
Information: http://www.subtletechnologies.com/2007/

The Creativity Conversation

Date: June 11 – 12, 2007
Location: De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
Abstract: Imagine a world where we could all work together, across disciplines, across conventional boundaries. Where the creative process could transfer from one person to the next, from one area to another, without impedance. Where tools existed that worked across fields and working methods. Where communication was easy because everyone talked the same language. Where we are more creative as a result. Is this possible? How can we make it possible? This is what we seek to explore with The Creativity Conversation (1), a two-day symposium exploring creativity. Source: The KMDiary Volume 8, Issue #4 (April 2007).
Information: http://creem.dmu.ac.uk/CreativityConversation/index.htm

Info source:

HCTP Digest April 27, 2007.