Blue Book Electives
Essentials of Medicine
Course Description:
Offered to 3rd and 4th year medical students, this course seeks to teach students how to become caring physicians and avoid the negative stereotypes portrayed in the media.
Students meet to discuss topics such as teamwork and Faculty-Resident-Student interactions, difficult situations including breaking bad news and angry patients and empathy.
Ethics in Medicine
Course Description:
This lecture series explores a variety of current ethical issues in healthcare using the expertise of the University of Texas Health Science Center faculty and Houston-area clinical and scientific professionals.
Past topics include DNR orders and living wills in emergency situations, confidentiality, ethical boundaries and the pharmaceutical industry and the ownership status of frozen embryos.
Practicing Better Medicine
through Public Health
Course Description:
The field of public health is a valuable source of information for practicing physicians and students alike.
This lecture series draws from this body of knowledge and explores concepts of population characteristics and epidemiology.
Past topics have included ways to combat obesity, access to health care and occupational health.
The Healer's Art
Course Description:
The Healer's Art addresses a hidden crisis in medicine: the growing loss of meaning and commitment experienced by physicians nationwide under the stresses of today's health care system.
Taking a mostly experiential approach, students are encouraged to identify, strengthen and cultivate the human dimensions of the practice of medicine, recognize the commonality of personal concerns among their peers and faculty, trust the power of listening and the presence to heal others and strengthen and develop a personal commitment to medicine as life's long work.
Kinder Better Doctors
Course Description:
For a six-week period students work with families in the critical care and LifeFlight waiting rooms of Memorial Hermann Hospital.
They receive hands-on training on how to listen, how to thoughtfully deliver bad news, how to express compassion and how to maintain hope.
Students also learn the role and importance of the patient's family in critical situations.
Empathic Communications
Course Description:
This course of eight interlinked workshops explores the subject of empathic communication between caregivers and their patients.
Using the dramatic arts as a framework, the class is both a philosophical and practical exploration of communications.
The course is led by Megan Cole, a professional actor. Working from a model of actor training, Cole provides participants with tools for viewing medical communications and ethics from a fresh perspective.
Literature and Medicine
Course Description:
Medicine and literature share a fundamental concern with the human condition in that they both ask:
What does it mean to be human?
What can threaten that humanity?
In discussing the literature about illness and health, the student is given a safe place to practice the interpretive skills crucial to medical practice.
Learning to listen to the stories patients tell making sense of those narratives enable one to better read one's patients.
The course will explore various genres of literature, and examine the way they each reveal the complexities of health, illness and practice.
The Art of Observation
Course Description:
Observation, description and interpretation are essential skills in clinical diagnosis. These talents are also requisite in the visual arts.
Thus, if medical students can improve their skills of observation in a safe environment by first looking at selected portrait art under the direction of experienced docents, this will translate to enhanced skills when observing medical photographs and ultimately when seeing a patient.
In a novel collaboration between the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Medical School students spend three evenings at the Museum enhancing their observation skills.
This in turn increases their awareness of emotional and character expression in patients.
An ongoing study of the effectiveness of this class is being conducted. For further information or to participate go to the following link: http://www.uth.tmc.edu/oto/ArtInstruction.htm
The Art of Listening
Course Description:
On average, physicians cut off their patients twenty seconds into the interview. This could lead to longer interviews, poorer information and a frustrated patient.
To address this, a unique course has been designed incorporating clinical sounds and taped music and live symphony performances Working in partnership with the Houston Symphony and clinical faculty this course seeks to enhance the student's listening skills resulting in a better clinical results experience for both the patient and physician.
Complementary and Alternative Medicine:
In Integrative Model
Course Description:
In recent years increasing numbers of patients are utilizing complementary and alternative medicine ( CAM) for both preventative and therapeutic intervention for a variety of conditions.
Although ongoing controversy exists regarding the scope, nature and even viability of such modalities, CAM is becoming a significant component of the U.S. health system.
Given these facts, it is very important for students and practicing physicians to have an awareness of the various types of CAM practices.
This lecture series will expose students to CAM and discuss various systems including Asian, folk and spiritual, physical manipulation, mind-body and supplements.
The Joys and Sorrows of Medicine:
In Introduction to Filmmaking
Course Description:
Observing, listening, and constructing a coherent narrative are critical skills needed to become an effective physician.
Yet these very skills are being eroded by medicine's reliance on increasingly sophisticated laboratory testing and other technological advances.
This class seeks to hone skills of observing, deep listening, communicating and constructing a clinical narrative that is meaningful to the patient.
In this course, students will practice interviewing each other; then they will interview UT faculty and edit short videos based these interviews.
In addition to enhancing communication, observation, listening and narration, this course will allow humanistic learning of the personal "joys and sorrows" of our own faculty.
Cultural Competency in Medicine
Course Description:
In the year 2000 almost 50 million people in the U.S. were ethnically diverse and that number continues to grow.
What were once considered minorities now make up the majority in Houston and Harris county. Likewise, our population continues to age and live in non-traditional settings; whether with a same-sex partner or in the streets.
This lecture series has been developed to help students understand how to treat an increasingly different patient population.
Students will hear from clinical practitioners that primarily treat these diverse populations and learn about epidemiological and historical trends and solutions.
Health Care and the Arts
Course Description:
Alternating between the School of Medicine and the School of Public Health, this performance series brings artists to the Health Science Center to explore the connections between health, illness, art and the artists.
History of Medicine
Course Description:
Drawing on the premise that a clearer view of the things we do now is gained by learning how they came to be, this lecture series considers different historical events in medicine and examines the concepts and events of the past that helped shape the practices and organizations that we have today.
