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Art classes improve diagnostic skills of medical students

18.08.2008 23:00 Arts - Source: cbc.ca

It seems that seeing is a skill that the world of art can lend to the world of medicine.

Doctors-in-training who took art classes while in medical school appear to have better skills of observation than their colleagues who have never studied art, according to a research from Harvard Medical School.

'You can look at a face and observe certain aspects of it, like lines on a face, the colour of it, the colour of the eyelids, the colour of the lips.'—Dr. Shah Khoshbin

Dr. Joel Katz and Dr. Shah Khoshbin started a program of elective art classes for medical students at the Boston-based school in 2005.

They released research last week that shows studying art can help students make up to 38 per cent more accurate observations.

"The assumption in the past was that either you know how to look or you don't," Dr. Khoshbin told CBC's Q cultural affairs show on Monday. "This is not true. You can train people to look, educators as well as artists know that."

Dr. Khoshbin, who had a background in art analysis himself before taking a medical degree, said art classes seem to help train students in what he calls "visual literacy."

"Quite often, when students miss a diagnosis, they tell us they didn't look," Dr. Khoshbin said.

"We trained students to become literate in talking to patients but we didn't have a way to make them be visually literate," until this course was developed, he said.

The course is taught by two art educators, who introduce students to art and use the resources of the nearby Boston Museum of Fine Arts to test their analytical and visual skills.

Abstract art helps, too

The course, taught early in medical school, seems to make students better at diagnosing patients in their graduating year, according to Dr. Khoshbin's research.

"You can look at a face and observe certain aspects of it, like lines on a face, the colour of it, the colour of the eyelids, the colour of the lips — these are all things once you are trained to look for it, you do better at it," Khoshbin said.

Even modern art can help students improve their powers of observation.

"Not only how to look at body and face but to look at patterns. The work of Jackson Pollock has no face and no body, so what is important is pattern recognition," he said.

Pattern recognition teaches students to observe more about, for example, a rash, than just the colour of the skin.

The result is a group of doctors who are more confident in their own powers of observation and thus more confident in their own skills of diagnosis.

"They have to be able to look at the human being, they have to be able to pick up cues that are not necessarily communicated verbally. So much is not communicated verbally," Khoshbin said.

Results quieted early critics

He says the program initially had its critics, but they have come around as students trained in art proved to be more observant.

"The common factor here, which is the human, is so subjective, the science that we practise is so subjective that you have to train the physician to be good at both. The human brings the science and the art together," he said.

And the side effect is a group of doctors who have a heightened appreciation of visual art, some of them becoming lifelong fans.

"A lot of them pick it up as an avocation," he said.

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