Pictured left to right: Ms. Ackert and Ms. Saffren
Paint Night, a knitting room, collage and mask making—CHHARTS’ wide-ranging activities are designed to “encourage ‘right-sided’ brain stuff,” says Ms. Saffren. “Everyone is type A in med school—and I’m including myself! Using that part of our academic side that’s not just core science feels good for a lot of people.” CHHARTS’ advisor is PCOM Counselor Ruth Conboy, DNP, LPC, who is completing a Certification of Professional Achievement in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She incorporates the arts into many of her service and program offerings. In an hour-long wellness workshop for third-year medical students, for example, students read poems by Glenn Colquhoun, MD, whose work Dr. Conboy discovered in Tools of the Trade: Poems for New Doctors, provided to all graduating PCOM DO students last year by Murray Zedick (DO ’62). The students respond to two poems: “Today I Want to Be a Doctor” and “Today I Don’t Want to Be a Doctor.” She uses reflective writing in support groups as well. Last year, the first in a planned annual art contest at PCOM drew almost 100 participants. Dr. Conboy is excited about an upcoming pilot initiative sponsored by the
Barnes Foundation, the renowned Philadelphia art collection, and funded by its Weintraub Fund. In four sessions, twenty first-year DO students will participate in exercises in the Barnes galleries that will focus their attention on close observation, communication and critical thinking skills that are essential in the medical field. Similar classes take place in medical schools around the country. During orientation, DO, PA and BioMed students complete a Post-it that identifies them as a PCOM student— and as something else. Dr. Conboy says, “It could be, ‘I’m a mother, I’m a dog lover, I’m an artist, I’m a soccer player.’ They know it when they come in, but they forget what else they are, because they get so engrossed in their studies. I’ve had students come to my office, months after being here, and say, ‘I don’t know myself anymore. All I do is study.’ And now I can say, ‘What did you put on that Post-it?’ We try to help them hold on to those parts of their personhood that were important before.”
DIGEST 2018
27