“Awakening the Heart of Medicine”
Introduction by: The Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal
The Healer’s Art is a medical school curriculum 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 UCSF School of Medicine. It is a 15-hour quarter-long elective that has been taught annually at UCSF since 1993. The course’s innovative educational strategy is based on a discovery model, and draws on tested approaches and theories from such fields as humanistic psychology, formational theory, and cognitive and Jungian psychology. The UCSF course annually draws approximately one third of the first year class, and has demonstrated that curriculum can be transformative as well as informative. The Healer’s Art course was featured in U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Graduate Schools” issue for 2002 as an example of excellence in medical education. In addition to the UCSF experience, the course has been successfully replicated at 100+ other medical schools within the U.S. as well as being taught at a number of medical schools internationally.
The Healer’s Art addresses the hidden crisis in medicine, the growing loss of meaning and commitment experienced by physicians nationwide under the stresses of today’s health-care system. Numerous surveys document the difficulties physicians are having in maintaining a sense of personal and professional satisfaction in their work and maintaining an ongoing commitment to the profession. Rates of physician dropout are presently climbing nationwide. Among medical educators, the question of how to stress-proof students to meet the challenges of practice has become urgent.
Meaning is the antecedent of commitment. The pressures of contemporary practice may require us to broaden our customary educational objectives and goals, to help students develop the capacity to find meaning lifelong in the same systematic way we now foster the skills to maintain a current knowledge base and technical expertise.
The Healer’s Art is a process-based curriculum that enables the formation of a community of inquiry between students and faculty. It takes a highly innovative, interactive, contemplative and didactic approach to enabling students to perceive the personal and universal meaning in their daily experience of medicine. Evaluations are uniformly outstanding, and the faculties as well as the students describe the experience of the course as unique in their professional training.