#15 Writing to Heal (Part 2)

Doctors in Business

Welcome to Episode 2 of our Spotlight Series, where we will be discussing the many ways that doctors and doctors-in-training can hone their writing skills, outside of clinical notes. In Part One, Dr. Colleen Farrell speaks candidly about her journey through writing and medicine, including her experience with writing about mental health, the confidence gap she witnessed in clinical medicine which inspired her Rudin Fellowship Project, and the essence of storytelling. Thanks to Darlina Liu for producing this episode, to our podcast leads, Shiv and Darlina, and to the band Night Float for providing our music. This episode was sponsored by the Master Scholars Program in Humanistic Medicine at the NYU School of Medicine as part of our four-episode Spotlight Series featuring: Medicine & Improv, Medicine & Writing, Medicine & Art, and Medicine & Dance. "Our program takes a broad, inclusive approach to medical humanities, with the goal of supporting students’ creative and intellectual interests outside the scope of traditional medical education. Many of our students come into medical school with a passion for the humanistic disciplines. Others develop this along the way, after encountering particular experiences or questions over the course of their training and looking to art or history or one of the social sciences to explore them more deeply. Students can do this through one of our mini-courses, like Art & Anatomy or Medical Improv, or through our Rudin Fellowship in Medical Ethics and Humanities, if they have a more targeted research project in mind. Many of our courses actually grow out of student-generated ideas—Medical Improv is a great example. Participants in our program often report that it helps sustain the many dimensions of their identities beyond their interest in biomedicine, and that the freedom of choice (either in selecting seminars or in the Rudin Fellowship, where students design completely individualized projects) is validating and empowering in a context that can often feel very hierarchical. It is imperative that we recognize and support each of our students as a whole person if we want them to develop into the kind of physicians who treat each of their patients as a whole person." – Katie Grogan, Associate Director, MSPHM