The UNM School of Medicine is getting a taste of art from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.
Students can now take Perspectives in Medicine sessions, in which they study art to construct a skill set for diagnosing patients, said Jackie M., director of education at the museum. M. teaches the program, which runs every three weeks.
Joseph Bergsten, a second-year medical student, is taking the Perspectives in Medicine sessions and said that before he started the course, he didn’t think he could use what he learned in the course with patients.
“Before I took the course, I was really skeptical,” he said. “I felt that it would be a little less relevant because I didn’t know how it would be tied together.
However, after I started taking the course, I automatically realized the value. I realized that the purpose of it was to show that you can take a person who knows nothing about medicine and they can tell you about their health. Just like taking a person who doesn’t know anything about art but can tell you what they see in the art. It is a really valuable course.”
M. said the sessions include hands-on activities as well as guest speakers. The course is meant to let medical students use art techniques and apply them to the medical field. In the end, students should be able to use these techniques to better analyze and communicate with a patient, she said.
Bergsten said the class involves analyzing a piece of artwork and asking questions about it.
“And the ultimate goal is to be able to look at our patients and be able to ask the right questions in order for the physicians to know what the patient is experiencing,” he said.
Bergsten said the sessions also promote ethics and help students become better physicians.
“It’s good because most of the times that we learn how to treat patients, it is very calculated,” he said. “We learn a step-by-step process on how to make a diagnosis. This is very good because it teaches us how to work with a patient by being more personal.”
Christina Fenton, director of the UNM Health and Sciences Center Art Program, said this program is the first of its kind to be integrated into the UNM medical school’s curriculum.
“This will let physicians see more than just a body part of a person,” she said. “Rather, they will be able to focus on the whole person because they will have learned about how to analyze facial expressions and body language. Artists are taught to look at art from many vantage points, which is very different from the linear approach used in the medical field.”
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Bergsten said the class taught him to ask more open-ended questions, rather than rushing through a diagnosis. He said medical school does offer a class teaching students how to interview patients, Foundations in Clinical Practice (FCP), which is similar to what he is learning through the Perspectives in Medicine sessions.
“I think that this new program would be very beneficial to medical students, especially if they integrated the FCP patient interview concept with this new art-based idea. It teaches us how to let the patient tell their story as we, physicians, sit back and listen,” he said.
M. said UNM should be commended for exploring the use of art in the medical field. The museum held a sampler program last spring, and then added the Perspectives in Medicine sessions to the 2009 curriculum.
“UNM has a reputation for being adventuresome in terms of the way that they use the arts in treatment,” M. said. “And though this program has been utilized by other medical schools, it says a lot for UNM that they would be among the first to explore the idea.”
Fenton said that the idea for the Perspectives in Medicine sessions came from an article in the Boston Globe more than a year ago. The article explained a similar collaboration of an art institution and the Harvard Medical School.
“I got really excited after reading the article and shared the idea with Dr. Steven Padilla, the director of dermatology at UNM,” Fenton said. “I found out that he was on the board at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. It turned out that (Jackie M.) was creditable to teach the program. Everything just worked out perfectly.”
