How can one benefit from a humanistic values medical course?

Modern medical practice confronts a crisis of knowledge, compassion, safety, cost, and leadership; therefore, person-centered healthcare (PCH) is necessary. PCH provides scientific rigor and a humanistic dimension to healthcare. At the heart of PCH is medical education that develops feelings of empathy, display of communication skills, and clinician reflexivity; however, the traditional medical curricula often cannot maintain these aspects. As a response, the Medical School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens implemented an elective course called “Humanistic Values and Modern Medicine," which included engaging students in literature, art, and philosophy to nurture emotional intelligence and reflective practice. The ultimate success of the intervention is contingent on students' receptivity toward tangible humanistic stimuli, students' sustained engagement with the stimulus, and the translation of the experience into personal and professional awareness. Arts-based methods were used, including Visual Thinking Strategies, which expand observation, enhance problem-solving, foster empathy, and build the patient-clinician relationship, and philosophical inquiry, which enhances critical reasoning skills and promotes interdisciplinary awareness. Well-scaffolding engagements with humanistic stimuli can offer a significant transformation of medical training and prepare students to better cope with complexity in medicine, and provide capabilities such as resilience which are vitally important as students navigate medicine as a vocation grounded in empathy, reflection, and human connection with meaning.