Better Doctors Through an Appreciation of the Arts

Announcer: Asking questions. Seeking perspectives. Searching for answers. Algorithms for Innovation, live from Philadelphia at the AAMC 2013.

Chris: I'm Chris Frymoyer, a second-year medical student at Jefferson.

Interviewer: Let's talk about the doctor of the future. How do you see that reflected in the medical student of the future?

Chris: Well I think one of the big things that we've been talking about at Jefferson, I'm on the curriculum committee there and I know a lot of the physicians are pretty passionate about emphasizing the humanistic aspect of medicine and arts, and how that sort of thing plays into making physicians better observers, better clinical care. And a lot of the doctors there feel pretty passionately about trying to integrate stuff like that into the curriculum, maybe something as simple as going to a museum and looking at the artwork there.

So I think when you think about the arts and you're looking at a painting, for example, you have to use all of your observation skills to see different things, to sort of critique it and look at it in different ways. I think it's just more of an expanded way of thinking about things, which is more relatable to clinical medicine and to how we are really expected to think for the rest of our lives, which is completely different than taking a multiple-choice test.

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