Type of Course: Professional

Reflective MedEd

The "About" section of this blog explains its purpose as follows: "Reflective MedEd is dedicated to reflective practice in medical education and care of the person. We publish contributions that offer insight and illumination into the experience of educating the next generation of physicians. We welcome the thoughts of educators, patients, and all who foster awareness of the human dimension of doctoring and develop advocates for the just and equitable treatment of all patients." Especially welcome are submissions that address "social justice and a concern for marginalized and vulnerable populations, the role of faith in medical practice, and ethical standards of decision making." Reflective MedEd is supported by the Ralph P. Leischner, Jr., MD, Department of Medical Education at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. Blog posts include both personal narratives and reflective essays from a variety of experiences and perspectives. For example: "How COVID Impacted my First Patient and Patient Death Experience," "What I have Learned About Trust from Black Women," and "The Wolf: How skeptical should we be of our patients?"

Haiku Rules of the Road

The online publication Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine provides this brief set of instructions for writing haiku. The Pulse site also includes many examples of haiku. These instructions (and examples from the site) could be used in a variety of settings. For example, the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative teaches a session on writing haiku as part of it's narrative scribe training, a workshop dedicated to developing the skills of listening closely to a story, and then offering it back to the teller. Just as medical record keeping often distills a detailed patient narrative into the forms required for diagnosis and health record keeping, so too haiku can be used to distill a narrative into a gist. The contrast between what details might make it into an electronic health record and what details a haiku might focus upon can prompt discussion of what is left out of many clinical interactions. Writing haiku can also be a useful exercise in college courses. It is an accessible form of poetry to teach as one example and can prompt discussion of what constitutes a narrative.

Heart Sounds

In this 5 minute read, a first year medical student discusses treating a patient whose family had to overcome indifference in the ER in order for him to receive treatment. Additionally, the medical student illustrates managing the unknown when assisting a patient with an advanced and nuanced condition. The student decides that the best treatment they can provide is listening to the family's complaints, fears, and happy moments in order to encourage them to keep believing in this patient's future. The story touches on cardiology as a specialty and would benefit pre-medical undergraduates as well as professional students recently starting their health profession. It highlights the importance, and difficulty, of active listening.

Fifty-five word stories: “Small jewels” for personal reflection and teaching

Fifty-five word stories are brief pieces of creative writing that use elements of poetry, prose, or both to encapsulate key experiences in health care. In this article, family physician Colleen Fogarty describes how she has used 55-word stories in a seminar she led at the 2009 annual meeting of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM). The article includes a table with instructions on how to write a 55-word story, a description of her seminar and tips on how she taught it, and examples of writing and reactions from the faculty in family medicine residency programs who participated in her seminar. The article is available free of charge in PubMed.

Tourette Syndrome: The biomedical and the literary.

The blog "According to the Arts" is written for the general public. The posts juxtapose a medical description of an illness or disability, in this case Tourette Syndrome, with a novel in which one of the main characters exhibits the condition. The novel captures the signs and symptoms, and describes how Tourette syndrome can affect lives of people living with Tourette and of living with someone who has it. The biomedical text from a neurology journal describes the characteristic tics and behaviors. Comparing the story to the medical account shows the science vs humanities perspectives on illness and could be useful for undergraduate classes in health humanities, especially ones focused on writing. Also useful for health professions students and professionals to emphasize the human factors often missed in clinical encounters.