Medical Matters: Using art to express emotion is a crucial release for doctors

One hundred doctors are sitting in a lecture theatre listening to a musical recording. When the piece is finished a 100-year-old painting depicting a medical consultation is shown on a screen.

This is followed by a Betjeman poem about a trip to a specialist and a bad diagnosis.

After each artwork the participants discuss the thoughts and emotions evoked in them. Then there is a creative writing session; each doctor writing about a difficult encounter. It is amazing what comes up, and the session is by turns instructive and insightful. I am at the Wonca (World association of family doctors) European conference and the session is called Medicine and the Arts.

I suppose some will wonder why we bother. The notion of a roomful of doctors sitting around intently discussing a poem that was written 50 years ago is strange to many people, and indeed to many doctors.

There was a time when you would regularly hear that medicine is an art as well as a science. This reasonable point of view has been a bit neglected until recently. Medicine strives to be increasingly scientific and evidence based, which is understandable and even desirable, but there is a danger that the art component can be overlooked. But the pendulum seems to be swinging back.

Performing arts medicine

For instance, performing arts medicine is a fast growing speciality. This is a bit like sports medicine for performers – treating musicians, actors and dancers and recognising their special requirements. The Performing Arts Medicine Ireland society is now active and Dr Ronan Kavanagh and Dr Juliet Bressan, who are both talented writers and musicians as well as doctors, are among the founders and main champions in Ireland.

Medical schools all over the world now have humanities programmes. They endeavour to give students the skills to recognise their emotions and access the healing powers of art.

One creative writing exercise often used has the student describe a medical encounter from the point of one and then the other protagonist. Some never forget seeing themselves through the eyes of the patient. They are also encouraged to express themselves as performing artists as well as clinicians, and video clips are part of the teaching.

The beneficial effects of art therapy on patients are well known and especially useful with children. The huge rise in social dancing in Ireland is a great example of practical art therapy. Many ageing people on their own go dancing for exercise, company and self-expression.

Every year in the Wonca conferences I join the group of European GPs interested in the concept of teaching medicine through the arts.

We recognise that doctors are only human, but are under pressure to achieve incredibly high standards. To work like a machine, joylessly and without soul, is also known as being burned out and is ultimately disastrous for doctor or patient.

A GP is involved in more human drama in a week than most people are in a year. A junior doctor in a hospital will experience extremes of emotion that few will encounter outside a war. They simply have to express their emotions, make sense of it all and reflect their feelings.

Medical students are often so busy that they neglect the things that gave them joy. They stop reading novels, playing music and sports, and forget to take them up again. The arts can reward you in as many different ways as there are types of people. Art can steady you and help you think. You can see the apparently mundane in a new and exciting way. It can cut through nonsense, nurture the spirit, help you express your mood and recognise your own feelings.

In turn you can recognise prejudice or distress, illogical thinking or poor judgment in your encounters with others. Would you rather a doctor who has done work on their emotions and sensitivity or one who carried on and bottled them all up?

It is questionable if art should have a function, or exist for its own sake. Maybe we should look on the benefits of art upon medicine, doctors and patients as a pleasing side effect. Science can and will change with research, and today’s gospel is often tomorrow’s heresy. Art is eternal.

Dr Pat Harrold is a GP in Nenagh, Co Tipperary