5 Reasons Studying the Humanities is Helping Us in Medical School
Tori Kinamon and Kelly Goo graduated from Brown’s Health & Human Biology concentration in 2017. They were my advisees and I remember fondly so many of our conversations together. Kelly and Tori graduated in 2017 and have since reunited at Duke University’s School of Medicine where they are in their first year. I invited them to reflect on Brown’s Health & Human Biology concentration and how it prepared them for medical school. Health & Human Biology is an interdisciplinary program that requires students to select an array of coursework outside of the biological sciences. Many students use this opportunity to take courses in the humanities – adding depth to their study of the human condition, health and well-being. Here is what Tori and Kelly have to say about how this was a boon for medical school.
5 Reasons Studying the Humanities is Helping Us in Medical School
By Tori Kinamon and Kelly Goo
We met L* on our first day of medical school. She was the guest speaker for the first “Clinical Correlation” of the year, a lecture series in which our instructors invite patients to speak with the MS1 class about their experience of illness. We were sitting in the lecture hall in our newly received white coats-- perhaps a bit nervous at the prospect of being cold-called for an answer but more so giddy with excitement at the prospect of meeting our first “patient.”
Dr. A*, a lovely Palliative Care physician, introduced L* and set the stage for her story. L* had lost her husband just two years ago, at the age of 26, to metastatic cancer. L recounted, with incredible composure, the progression of her husband’s illness. She sprinkled in bits of humor here and there, with Dr. A chiming in on his memories of the couple. She discussed, with full transparency, how difficult it was to navigate not only the health decline of a loved one, but also the healthcare system and callous doctors and rigid insurance companies on top of all that. She didn’t resist talking when her voice started to tremble and wiped away tears as they started to fall. As her story (and that of her husband) unfolded, the emotional atmosphere of the room drastically changed.
The intimacy of the conversation was striking. Certainly, it was a threshold that Dr. A and L had passed a long time ago; but, to be invited into that intimacy for the first time as a complete stranger was profound.
What often gets lost about medicine is how much of it is about the human story: how we experience pain, sadness, joy, loss. Doctors are present for some of the most pivotal moments of people’s lives, and therefore need to be well-equipped to handle uncertainty and vulnerability. We need to be comfortable with the fact that there aren’t always multiple choice answers to questions that patients face in their lives and in their medical conditions.
Humanities classes push us to dive into the depths of the human experience. They prompt us to question not only the science of a disease or process, but also what lies beyond the biological in the psychological and socio-environmental realms. In this way, humanities classes encourage us to recognize that pursuits that don’t have a cut and dry answer are as worthy as those that do.
Medical school admissions is a daunting and competitive process, but we want to dispel any myths that there is one “right way” to get into medical school (namely, by taking tons of STEM courses). We were both Health & Human Biology (HHB) Concentrators, and therefore, by nature of the concentration, took many courses outside of STEM. We both agree that the humanities courses we completed as part of HHB prepared us to lean boldly into the intimacy of emotionally charged conversations. Because in those courses, we learned about how people process and respond to the human condition; these learning experiences helped plant the seeds of empathy, curiosity, and compassion that have since been nourished in medical school.
Of course, there are basic science requirements all applicants need to take, and we won’t deny that taking Physiology at Brown helped us tremendously throughout our first semester of medical school. But while the benefit of humanities classes can’t be measured in test scores, we want to share how they have been equally if not even more important in our medical education so far.
1. (Kelly) Communication/social skills: So much of patient care centers on understanding patients’ stories and analyzing the deeper meaning behind their words, which is a skill I’ve developed from many English courses. There are multiple layers of interpretation when a patient says “I don’t feel well” or “I haven’t been able to take my medicine,” and it is an essential role of doctors to get to the core of how their illness impacts their life. Writing skills are another important component of clinical care, as doctors need to be able to compose a concise yet meaningful clinical note that will become a permanent part of a patient’s medical record and inform their future care.
· Coursework examples: Persuasive Communication, Writing the Academic Essay, Writing the Medical Narrative, Life Writing
2. (Kelly) Cultural competency as an ongoing learning process: Medical professionals have a responsibility to take care of all patients, and empathy is a means of establishing trust and rapport with the diverse patients under their care. Anthropology classes have helped me foster an understanding of different cultures and hone a reflexive open-mindedness to different ways of life. The integration of these important contextual factors in clinical care can facilitate shared-decision making and help patients feel welcomed and heard. Providing health care to patients in a language they are most comfortable expressing themselves in can especially help prevent misunderstandings and make patients more at ease!
· Coursework examples: Culture and Health, Culture and Human Behavior, Spanish for Health Care Workers
3. (Tori) Wider context of health: It is critically important to understand that so much of health and disease happens outside of the clinical setting...in the homes, communities, and systems within which patients live. Classes in the public health department exposed me to various social drivers that directly affect health. Thinking about where a patient lives, what type of transportation they have, what their socioeconomic status is, and what the illness means to the patient is essential in creating treatment plans that the patient is able to follow. In the first year of medical school at Duke, all of us participate in an “APPLE: Appreciating Patient Perspectives through Longitudinal Encounters” program. Through this experience, I’ve been able to see these drivers at play in my “patient’s” life and come to understand the significant impact they have on his health. In turn, this has me convinced that as physicians (well, future physicians that is!) we have a responsibility to and are strategically positioned to confront health policies and systems that propagate health disparities. I owe it to my future patients to do so.
· Coursework examples: Introduction to Public Health, Burden of Disease in Developing Nations, Healthcare in the US, Disability/ Health and Community
4. (Tori) Understanding human behavior: In medicine, you have the opportunity to create very unique relationships, namely the physician-patient relationship. You may meet patients in the most difficult moments of their lives; being able to walk into this situation, establish a sense of trust, and show empathy as you embrace their fears is critical to patient-centered care. There’s not a lab manual or protocol that will tell you how to do this… and what works well with one patient may not with another. At the root of this endeavor is embracing the depth of human experience and all of the uncertainty that comes with that. Psychology/ CLPS courses gave me but a glimpse of what this may look like. Understanding someone’s psychology allows you to tailor your bedside manner to what an individual patient needs. By observing how people behave, learning about their past experiences, and inquiring about their goals for the future, you can come to understand them as the PERSON sitting in the hospital bed, as opposed to merely a disease process or condition in room 321 that needs to be treated. And, from personal experience, I can tell you that this is what a patient wants...and boldly, even needs...their doctor to do as they grapple to find their own identity that was thrown out of a hospital room window when their lives were suddenly confined to the space within those walls.
· Coursework examples: The Personality, Elementary Psychology, Social Psychology, Introduction to Human Development/Education
5. (Kelly & Tori ) Teamwork/community service: Make sure you leave room in your schedule to take advantage of a few of the many service opportunities there are at Brown! The positive impact -- however small -- I’ve contributed to people’s lives through such organizations has been a great privilege of my college experience. By experiencing the type of interpersonal relationships health care providers form with those seeking our help, these service opportunities informed my decision to pursue medicine way more than any of the classes I took.
· Extracurricular examples: Health Leads, CareFree Clinic
I (Tori) definitely second what Kelly said! You can learn so much from the people and communities that surround you on College Hill and perhaps more, off of it! I’d encourage you to take a deep dive into the Providence community. It is here that you can start applying what you learn in the classroom and grow significantly beyond what was addressed in a textbook. My favorite activities involved educating children in local elementary schools on an array of health topics. Through these experiences, I was able to expand my teaching skill set. This was (and still is) important to me because I am deeply invested in and committed to patient education! I’m a big believer in the cliché, “knowledge is power”-- patients with knowledge about their health can be better positioned to advocate for their own health and prepared to ask questions as needed.
· Extracurricular examples: FIT Club, 4-Safety Internship, Community Health Advocacy Program
We know that choosing a field of study can be a daunting task, but we were and continue to be grateful for the Health and Human Biology concentration. Indeed, this concentration (combined with the pre-med pre-reqs) provided us with the foundation that we needed to succeed in the medical school classroom. However beyond that, and arguably just as importantly, it’s given us a framework upon which we can continue to think deeply about the human experience and appreciate how that experience differs for each patient. Sure, you aren’t graded on this in medical school, but there’s not one grade that can compare to the feeling you get when you’ve listened to the heart of a patient without even putting the diaphragm of your stethoscope to their chest. And sometimes this heart and that story are just as valuable as the lub-dub lub-dub.
Happy humanizing!
