The Healer’s Art course is offered in the Creighton Medical School curriculum as an elective in the first year. It is intended to address the hidden crisis in medicine - a growing loss of meaning, satisfaction and committment in medicine. The course focuses on five main topics: the loss of meaning in medicine. loss and grief, death as mystery, experiencing awe in medicine, and service as a way of life.
This course is offered in the first year in order to nurture and grow the enthusiasm for service with which medical students arrive. Over the course of the intense medical training the medical students undergo, many lose a sense of their humanity as they become physicians. Yet their compassion and caring is often as healing as the knowledge they have acquired. This course focuses on service and humanity as the lens through which they see the rest of their medical education.
The class convenes for five three-hour long sessions, most beginning with a “seed’ talk followed by small group sessions which focuses on a personal application of the seed talk. The sessions are attended not only by the students, but by experienced physicians as well. The intimate atmosphere allows for the exchange of stories and installing the need for humanism in the experience of medicine. This format also allows the creation of a network to promote the health of “the healers”, guiding us to care not only for the patients, but for each other.
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The Healer’s Art curriculum was designed by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal, and Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine. The Healer’s Art course was featured in “U.S., News and World Report Best Graduate Schools” issue for the 2002 school year as an example of excellence in medical education. In addition to the UCSF experience, the course has been successfully replicated at 58 medical schools worldwide.
Links to other schools offering The Healer’s Art;
· Harvard Medical, Dental and Public Health Schools
· University of California, San Francisco
· University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
· Oregon Health and Science University
Link to The Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal
Link to information about Rachel Naomi Remen, founder.