ART AND MEDICINE
Using Art to Heal Physician Burnout By Ruth Berggren, MD, MACP From the beginning of time, human expression through music, literature and visual art forms has provided respite from the harsh realities of life. As healers, we’d do well to remember the words of our fellow physician Albert Schweitzer, the Nobel Peace Laureate, musician-theologian, who noted: “Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter — to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.” Despite magnificent advances in the technology of medical science, we’ve found neither pills nor procedures to soothe the souls of the suffering as powerfully as music, poetry, literature and the visual arts. As statistics on physician burnout accrue, with controversies swirling about the shrinking pies of physician time and health care resources, it is still the case that the arts and medical humanities can transport us “from the world of unrest to a world of peace.” Students and faculty at the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics at UT Health San Antonio believe that by studying, creating, sharing and surrounding ourselves with art forms (all of which are narrative storytelling in some way), we find not just those much-sought moments of transcendence: we become better healers, find community through shared values, and answers to professional burnout. In 2008, during my first year as center director, a medical student proposed to start a literary and arts journal by and for her peers. She proposed the journal’s title be Connective Tissue: a metaphor describing how the expression of our humanity can bind us together as a community, analogous to the manner in which connective tissue binds organs together into one body. Approaching Connective Tissue’s 10th anniversary, I am struck by its sustained growth and diversity: Our current issue brought submissions from nursing, dental, medical and PA students as well as from faculty, staff and even patients. There is no shortage of talent in our ranks. From photographers to poets, painters and writers of prose, everyone has a story to tell, and everyone has a need to tell their story. Connective Tissue entries illustrate not only the pathos of human suffering from disease, discrimination and injustice, but also the beauty to be discovered in quiet contemplation, the hard-won joys of transformation as learners discover their professional identities. 32 San Antonio Medicine • July 2017
Healer’s Touch is a statue by artisan carvers of the Shona Tribe in Zimbabwe. A much smaller version of this artwork was adopted by the Daisy Foundation in 1999 as Daisy Awards for Extraordinary Nurses to honor the superhuman work nurses do for patients and their families every day. University Hospital is a participating hospital in the program. Photo of statue by Mark Greenberg.
Connective Tissue features many examples of visual arts, and over time, a uniquely UT Health San Antonio genre has emerged from work by two of our recent graduates. You have been reading the genre on the pages of this magazine in recent months. Chris Yan and Sara Noble concocted “Project 6-55,” a writing workshop customized for busy clinicians who frequently believe that they are too busy or untalented for reflective writing. The workshop facilitates reflection on the meaning of our work as healers by pairing two previously described “flash-fiction” genres: the six word story (said to have originated with Ernest Hemingway during a bar-room wager), and the 55-word story (origins obscure but appearing in medical literature by the turn of this century). After a brief introduction, participants are given paper, pencil and a prompt, such as “think about a moment during your work week, when you were in the presence of a patient and you experienced …moral distress.” The workshop leader may substitute other words evocative of emotion, doubt, strife