99 Hailey’s Reflections on Learning
Reflecting on learning means taking the extra step to summarize your thoughts and understandings for a better overall learning experience. By writing notes and reflecting on what you learn about you can better organize and map connections to your previous experiences. Creating connections between learning experiences helps to be able to retain new information and to be better abled to express what you learned in future situations. Each individual will take away different potential learning components even when learning through the same sources of information. Every individual perspective is important to add to the collective learning experience.
Biomedical & Social Sciences vs Health Humanities
There are two distinct ways of gathering and understanding of data when it comes to health and illness, medicine, and healthcare. Traditionally, ideas and knowledge regarding health topics has been learned through the biomedical and social sciences. This epistemology is learned through identifying particular variables to compare using statistical methods. These methods are often through experiments, survey’s and interviews, and demographic data. By understanding health data this way actors in healthcare can produce generalizable and objective knowledge to aid in explaining, predicting, or controlling ways of addressing health. As biomedical science has become increasingly complex and specialized, a humanities way of understanding health has become increasingly important for healthcare. A humanities way of knowing uses cultural descriptions of health expressed through film, art, literature, story-telling and more. The goal is to give voice to every human to capture and represent the rich, diverse human experience to advocate for people through empathy and understanding. Actors in healthcare should seek to incorporate a health humanities perspective in their career to better provide individualized care through empathy.
Active Listening Reflection
I used active listening with my partner, my coworker, and my friend. At work on Tuesday I actively listened to my coworker. She has been going through losing her roommate and best friend very suddenly and somewhat tragically about a month ago. I had gotten to work and asked how she was doing and I could tell she wasn’t feeling well. I made sure to stop and listen to whatever she wanted to say. We have known each other for a long time, but only recently reconnected a couple months ago when we started working together again. I don’t think she thought too much was different although she could tell I was taking the time to listen to her and she appreciated it.
On Tuesday it was my birthday, so after work I stopped by my friends work to see her. She had just gotten back from a trip where she eloped! She was telling me about the day and how it was really nice but her shoes hurt her feet and she still had blisters. She didn’t notice anything was very different because we typically actively listen to each other, but especially about something so important as her wedding.
Finally, at night I actively listened to my partner. We just bought a house this year so he was telling me all the improvements he wanted to get done outside before the winter gets here. He could tell that I was making sure to listen and ask questions for details and also provide my input when he wanted.
Like we discussed in class, in each case the person being listened to can feel that they are being given the time to fully express themselves, which is an elevated version of being heard than throughout the average moment in our busy lives.
Why Medicine Needs Art & Andrea Wilsons approach on Narrative Therapy
Medicine benefits from art because it is a way that humans connect, empathize and become open to new ideas and perceptions. Through various art forms, persons with illness and disability can express their story and experiences for others to understand and perhaps relate to. Andrea Wilson practices narrative therapy as a way for patients to understand their story and disconnect from the shame and stigma they have felt from peers, loved ones and even themselves. We have come to understand that the experience of illness or disability is isolating and that storytelling through art is a valuable tool for reshaping their individual experience as well as shifting cultural ideas in health and healthcare. Providing an opportunity like narrative therapy allows for individuals who are inexperienced in this art form to still benefit from this process. With Narrative Therapy, patients can be one on one or in a group setting where questions that are prompted by the therapists are open for the patient to control their experience while also disconnecting from shame in the process of retelling their story. This professional form of active listening is important in conjunction with other medical therapies to lower the medicalization of the experience of illness or disability.