4 Reflections on Learning

Health humanities captures the key distinctions between medicine and health. This class has focused on the difference between medical humanities and health humanities. Health humanities is a more exclusive area of study that focuses on where content can be found and how it appears. The background of each individual patient comes into play within health humanities. The sociological aspects are looked into as well as the gender, ethnicity, culture, religion, etc. Medicine is one component while patients are looking beyond that for their needs. This information and background is very new to me and is important for my future fields of study. Being able to distinguish between the medical parts of healing is very important to how a patient is looked after. There are different aspects of healing that we have explored. Art can create a healing environment much greater than medicine. An example of art impacting healing that we discussed was in Hospice. When medicine was no longer an option music was able to bring comfort to the patients. The humanities side of healing is very important to understand, and can impact the way individuals accept their diagnosis’s.