Art and medicine

UNITED STATES: What makes a good doctor? Well, art lessons seem to help, according to the Harvard Medical School. University researchers say that trainee doctors who take art classes have better powers of observation than medical students who do not study art. Since 2005, the medical school has offered art classes as an elective.

Dr Shah Khoshbin started the art courses with a colleague, Dr Joel Katz. “The assumption in the past was that either you know how to look or you don’t,” Khoshbin told CBC News. “This is not true. You can train people to look — educators as well as artists know that. Quite often, when students miss a diagnosis, they tell us they didn’t look.”

The course is taught by two art instructors, who also take their students to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where they look at different types of art. Modern art, for example, helps students recognize patterns.  “The work of Jackson Pollock has no face and no body, so what is important is pattern recognition,” Khoshbin says. This can be important for treating skin diseases, according to Khoshbin.

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