ISHI - Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal
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ISHI Programs & Workshops

The Healer's Art

Awakening the Heart of Medicine

Course Description

ISHI also offers The Healer's Art Faculty Development Workshop which trains faculty to replicate this pioneering course at medical schools nationwide.
The Healer's Art is a medical school curriculum designed by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, 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 1992. 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 one-third of the Year I class, Students + Skeletonand 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 "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 will be offered at 64 medical schools in 2009-2010.

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 drop-out are presently climbing nationwide. Among UCSF Studentmedical 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 upgrade 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. The students describe the experience of the course as unique in their professional training. A decade of evaluations suggests that the course has had as profound effect on the faculty as on the students.

The Healer's Art has been replicable for the past 12 years at UCSF, and it has demonstrated a replicability of outcome at schools of very diverse regional cultures. The course consists of five three-hour evening sessions spaced two weeks apart, each divided into large-group and small-group experience. The session topics are:

  • Discovering and Nurturing Your Wholeness
  • Sharing Grief and Honoring Loss I
  • Sharing Grief and Honoring Loss II
  • Beyond Analysis: Allowing Awe In Medicine
  • The Care of the Soul

Course Goals and Objectives

Goals

The Healer's Art course will encourage students to:
  • Identify, strengthen and cultivate the human dimensions of the practice of medicine
  • Recognize the commonality of personal concerns among their peers and gain support for personal development from peers and faculty
  • Accept the universality of loss and pain
  • Recognize grief as a self-care strategy for physicians, and identify strategies and tools of grieving
  • Recognize the importance of community for the healing of grief
  • Trust the power of listening and presence to heal others
  • Recognize that who they are is as important to their patients as what they know
  • Recognize and respond to the dimension of Mystery in the experience of illness
  • Strengthen and clarify a personal commitment to medicine as a life's work
  • Develop greater comfort with death and the death beliefs of patients
  • Develop an expanded definition of death
  • Recognize the legitimacy of awe in medicine, and develop the capacity for awe

Objectives

Students will:
  • Make an active commitment to strengthening and preserving their humanity
  • Experience the power of listening and being listened to
  • Experience healing relationships with other students
  • Offer group support to colleagues in preserving and developing personal humanity
  • Experience tools of self-remembering and stress reduction
  • Learn skills of grieving loss
  • Recognize personal meaning as a protection against burnout
  • Share their unanswered and unanswerable questions about death
  • Develop a greater willingness to wonder
  • Identify personal qualities that serve dying patients
  • Expand ideas about the physician's role in the area of death
  • Recognize the power of death to clarify life values
  • Recognize their experiences of service
  • Discover their innate altruism/generosity
  • Identify what serves and what does not

National Program

ISHI has received funding to enable the replication of The Healer's Art, and we have developed materials and guidebooks for those interested in establishing the curriculum at their institutions. We are available to consult by phone and email, and have initiated a network of faculty and Associate Deans involved in the implementation of the course. Our tradecraft training, The Healer's Art Faculty Development Workshop, will be held at Commonweal two times this year, giving the faculty participants the opportunity to learn and experience the course. Please contact Dianne Duchesne at if you would like further information.

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