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We've long known about books' ability to comfort, but can they have the power to heal? At a time when burnout is rife among practicing physicians and other clinicians, health care organizations are introducing systemic changes, including wellness programs. Beyond this, though, what might individual clinicians do to stave off burnout and fuel emotional resilience? New research suggests burnout relief may be as close at hand as a good novel. Reading for pleasure--especially, reading literary fiction--seems to enhance empathy and combat emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, thereby improving doctors' abilities to connect with the persons who are their patients and find joy in their work. Indeed, if reading for relaxation makes such a difference, should reading literature be a prescribed part of physician education and training? In this Medical Center Hour, Drs. Daniel Marchalik and Hunter Groninger examine emerging research on books' benefits for doctors and trace their own experience with the Literature and Medicine track at the Georgetown University School of Medicine.
One of medicine’s open secrets is that some patients request reassignment, or degrade, belittle, or harass health care professionals based on those professionals' race or ethnicity. Such patient conduct can raise thorny ethical, legal, and clinical challenges, and can be painful, confusing, and scarring for the physicians and other clinicians involved. This widely practiced, yet scarcely acknowledged, phenomenon poses a fundamental dilemma for law, medicine, and ethics. It also raises hard questions about how we should think about identity, health, and individual autonomy in the healthcare context and how we manage communication around representations of racial and ethnic bias. In this Koppaka Lecture, Drs. Lo and Paul-Emile will discuss their framework for considering and addressing this phenomenon.
The Koppaka Family Foundation Lecture in Medical Humanities
Anthropologist, activist, and priest Roshi Joan Halifax is the founder and head teacher of the Buddhist monastery, Upaya Zen Center. Seventeen years ago at Upaya, she pioneered a new form of bedside contemplative care known as "Being with Dying," which has since helped to illuminate and change the psychosocial, ethical, and spiritual care of the dying. Halifax's newest work probes what she calls five "edge states" of how we become involved with our fellow beings: altruism, empathy, integrity, respect, and engagement. In this Bice Memorial Lecture, she explores the risks and the opportunities for courage and compassion that persons in the helping professions encounter "at the edge."
Bice Lecture, Co-presented with the School of Nursing, UVA
January 23, 2019
Joe Richman
Since 1996, the Radio Diaries project has been giving people audio recorders and working with them to report on their own lives and histories. Collaborating with teens and octogenarians, persons with chronic and terminal illness, prisoners and prison guards, gospel preachers and bra saleswomen, the famous and the unknown, the project tells extraordinary stories of ordinary life. With stories aired on NPR, BBC, This American Life, and its own podcast, Radio Diaries has pioneered a new form of citizen journalism and, along the way, garnered every major award in broadcast journalism. This Medical Center Hour welcomes Radio Diaries’ founding director, Joe Richman, to share stories and draw parallels with health care practice, where, daily, clinicians traffic in the “extraordinary stories of ordinary life.”
The Edward W. Hook Lecture in Medicine and the Arts / Medical Grand Rounds
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine, UVA
Even as the University of Virginia and other medical schools across the U.S. prepare to graduate a new wave of physicians, what will be these doctors' roles and responsibilities in a health care system increasingly stressed by social and political pressures, cultural challenges, and financial shortfalls? And what will be—what should be—expected of physicians and the medical profession in years to come, in their practice, in communities, in policy circles, in the public square? In this Medical Center Hour, Dr. Christine Cassel, a longtime leader in medicine and medical education, offers her perspectives on what should be expected of physicians and other health professionals in coming years--in their practice, in their communities, in government and policy circles, and in the public square.
Twenty-first century physicians and other clinicians who are caring for patients in an era of unlimited knowledge, rapid knowledge turnover, and ever-more-sophisticated artificial intelligence (Watson!) increasingly need new skills and strategies. Such practitioners need too a renewed capacity for compassion. In this Medical Center Hour, eminent physician leader Dr. Steven Wartman, 2019 recipient of UVA's Brodie Medical Education Award, maps this critical juncture and challenges educators and other health professional leaders to reimagine and reengineer how we prepare doctors and other health care practitioners.
The Brodie Medical Education Award Lecture
Oral history interview with Edward Hogshire, class of 1970. Hogshire discusses the events surrounding the UVA student strike in May 1970 against the Vietnam War, and his participation in the events as a legal marshal.
Why do modern Americans eat so much sugar, and to what effect? This Medical Center Hour offers dual perspectives on the sweet stuff, what it does to/in us, and its many meanings in history and for health. UVA historian David Singerman and UVA physician Jennifer Kirby examine sugar’s impact on the body—past and present, historically, socially, physiologically, and nutritionally.
Amid the current opioid epidemic in the U.S., discourse around addicts and addiction can be overwhelmingly negative, pessimistic, and hopeless, reinforcing negative stereotypes. Even in health care, negativity about addiction prevails, making it more challenging for clinicians and organizations to respond with appropriate care, services, and resources. The toll of addiction is staggering. But while statistical and fiscal analyses of the national epidemic can also overwhelm and add to the negativity, might we gain a different view of addiction by accessing the particular experience of it, as it affects individuals and also their families? To know better what is at stake and how to foster recovery, this Medical Center Hour turns to poets Kate Daniels and Owen Lewis for their response to addiction when it strikes close to heart and home. How can writing serve to access the lived experience of addiction—in this case, addiction inside the family circle—and how might writing aid in recovery, for everyone involved?
Whistle Words is a multimedia project helping women reclaim their sense of self after a life-changing cancer diagnosis--with the simple aid of a pen. Charlottesville-based Whistle Words offers writing workshops for women in and after cancer treatment. Being part of this project as an adjunct or follow-up to treatment can make a real difference in participants' outlook and healing, as demonstrated by women's writings in the recently published anthology, Truth: Voices of Women Changed by Cancer. In this Medical Center Hour, Whistle Words' co-founder Charlotte Matthews and UVA nurse/breast cancer survivor/workshop participant Susan Goins-Eplee introduce Whistle Words and explore the healing power of writing.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
