The Healer’s Art: Reflecting on the Healer Within
By Amanda Reider and Robert Lerrigo
Contributing Writers
How do you tell a mother her son has died? How can we recognize loss and share in grief without giving ourselves away? How, in the midst of pain, stress and paperwork, will you remember why you became a physician? And how will you retain the awe?
No one knows how you’ll answer these questions—and no one can tell you how — but The Healer’s Art course can help.
In 1992, Rachel Naomi Remen, MD author of Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather’s Blessings began helping physicians and medical students to reclaim a sense of meaning and mission in their professional lives. Her course, The Healer’s Art, a UCSF winter elective for MS1s and MS2s has been offered each year since 1992. The course “clarifies each student’s intention to serve others, and make a personal commitment to medicine as their life’s work.”
Today, the course is offered annually at more than 60 medical schools in the United States and abroad and has evolved in magnitude and scope; each year’s course is unique and so is each student’s experience. Students and faculty come together for five three hour sessions. Each includes a large group session which encourages genuine inquiry, story-telling, discovery and reflection on specific topics followed by a small group session where students speak to their experience in an environment steeped in generous listening and colleagueship. In the final session of the course, students and faculty each write a mission statement to codify their own personal commitment to doctoring.
MS2 Robert Lerrigo credits the Healer’s Art with his personal medical discovery and recovery. Lerrigo, so inspired by the elective that he returned this year to help coordinate it, reflects on his experience:
“To be frank, my personal statement to enter medical school was a lie. As I wrote, I did not know – I could not know…what it means to have people rely on me to heal their wounds, to heal their daughter’s wounds, their mother’s, and father’s. Towards the middle of my first year, I was exhausted. I felt my spirit drowning from the emotional responsibilities of pretending to be a healer. All the hours I spent studying in the library did not help me carry the weight of making one person’s pain my own, or give me the confidence that I could handle being a witness to another person’s pain. At about the same time, other students told me about The Healer’s Art elective. What attracted me were the topics listed for each session: Retaining Your Wholeness, Meeting Loss and Honoring Grief, Mystery and Awe in Medicine, and Service, Calling and Commitment. The course commitment to open ended discussions, without right and wrong answers matched my own desire to discover answers to questions I could barely verbalize.
“And so I signed up. For me, The Healer’s Art became an affirmation that I was the right person to do this work, that the flaws and insecurities that make me human also make me the best kind of physician. During our last session, we each wrote a personal Hippocratic oath, essentially writing our personal statements again but this time from the heart. I can honestly say I’ve never been more truthful with myself. And I discovered that when others speak their truth as well, we are all connected.”
What are the words that capture your own dream of service? How can you maintain your commitment – to your future patients, your family and yourself – and grow as a person in Medicine? How will you keep your eyes wide and bright?
Come and explore these things for yourself!
Family and Significant Others are welcome to audit the large sessions and participate in their own small group experience.
The Healer’s Art is being offered as an elective this coming winter as Family & Community Medicine 171.01, for 1.5 units. It will meet from 6-9 p.m. on Wednesday evenings (January 13, 27, February 3, 17 and March 3, 2010. DR REMEN WILL OFFER HER ANNUAL PUBLIC LECTURE: The Art of Medicine: Remember That Who You Are Is As Important As What You Know, ON THURSDAY, JAN 7, Room N217.
FMI contact: Amanda.Reider@ucsf.edu, Kelli.Copeland@ucsf.edu, Lusine.Danakian@ucsf.edu, Mark.Delacruz@ucsf.edu, Matt.Hickey@ucsf.edu, Wesley.Chin@ucsf.edu. MS2’s: Kate.Chomsky-higgins@ucsf.edu, Robert.Lerrigo@ucsf.edu
This article appeared in the December 3, 2009 issue of Synapse.
