(Press-News.org) Mini-courses designed to increase creative stimulation and variety in physicians' daily routines can sharpen critical thinking skills, improve job satisfaction and encourage innovative thinking, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers who piloted a series of such courses.
"For decades, career development theory has identified a stage that occurs at midlife, characterized by a desire to escape the status quo and pursue new ventures," said Kimberly Myers, Ph.D., associate professor of humanities. "It is increasingly clear that these mid-career professionals are yearning to explore ways of thinking that are outside of their usual responsibilities."
The courses are an outgrowth of a pilot initiative called the Penn State Hershey Physician Writers Group, which Myers founded and facilitated. The group met every other week for three months and explored how medically related topics are featured in different literary genres. Participants wrote original pieces, which they discussed and edited with each other and Myers.
"The process of literary analysis, which is both methodical and intuitive, helps to sharpen the cognitive processes inherent in medical diagnosis and treatment that are so vital in medical practice," said Myers. "Group discussions also provide a refreshing opportunity for collaboration, which help to form new alliances among colleagues."
Many physicians' writings were published in professional journals, and the physicians reported overwhelming satisfaction with the experience. As a result of the pilot program's success, the researchers and their colleagues in the Department of Humanities developed and conducted eight mini-courses on different topics throughout 2010-2011.
Results of this project appear in Academic Medicine.
Although each course had its own objectives, the overarching goal of the series was to provide humanities-related, clinically relevant learning opportunities for health care practitioners.
"The topics covered fell into four general categories: reading, reflection, and discussion; creative expression; technology; and ethics," said Daniel George, Ph.D., assistant professor of humanities.
To accommodate busy schedules, the researchers scheduled these courses across an eight-month period and met three to five times total. Each hour of participation earned one Continuing Medical Education credit. Participants included physicians, nurses, administrative and support staff, medical and nursing students and health researchers and scientists.
Post-course surveys proved as favorable as the feedback from the Writers Group. Participants reported a high degree of satisfaction with learning new disciplines outside of biomedicine, using their training in uncustomary ways, forming new camaraderie with their colleagues, and enjoying a respite from the stressful flow of the workday.
"These courses offer an opportunity for intellectual and social 'play' to those who participate, which fosters workplace satisfaction and creative, innovative thinking," said George. "Efforts that implement programs like these in other medical settings could potentially contribute to reviving the health care system, which would ultimately benefit both practitioners and their patients."
###
Contributors to the mini-course series were Kimberly Myers, Ph.D., associate professor of humanities and English; Daniel George, Ph.D., assistant professor of humanities; Michael Green, M.D., professor of medicine and humanities; Paul Haidet, M.D., professor of medicine and humanities; Benjamin Levi, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pediatrics and humanities; Martha Levine, M.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and humanities; Daniel Shapiro, Ph.D., professor of humanities; and Phillip Wilson, Ph.D., professor of humanities.
New research from the University of Warwick suggests that Berlin has the best democratic space in the world, topping a list that includes London, Washington and Tokyo.
The list appears in a new book, 'Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance' written by Dr John Parkinson, from the University of Warwick's Politics and International Studies department.
Dr Parkinson carefully selected 11 capital cities and assessed how well they provide space for all kinds of democratic action. He visited Berlin, Washington, Ottawa, Canberra, Wellington, ...
"Sound vibrations are transmitted to the inner ear via anterior extensions of the swim bladder or via bony ossicles", the biologist Tanja Schulz-Mirbach explains how swim bladders may serve for hearing. The hearing sensitivity improves considerably in this way. The anterior part of the swim bladder functions in specialized fish species similar to an ear drum. Up to now the effects of the different swim bladder morphologies have not been investigated in detail in cichlid fishes. The behavioural biologists of the University of Vienna Tanja Schulz-Mirbach and Friedrich Ladich ...
Astronomers have constructed the largest-ever three-dimensional map of massive galaxies and distant black holes, which will help the investigation of the mysterious "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up 96 percent of the universe.
The map was produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III).
Early last year, the SDSS-III released the largest-ever image of the sky, which covered one-third of the night sky. The new data, "Data Release 9" (DR9), which publically releases the data from the first two years of this six-year project, begins expansion of this ...
They're everywhere -- in magazines, on the Internet, on television—people with super-thin bodies who are presented as having the ideal body form. But despite the increasing pressure to be thin, more and more of us are overweight. Now, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have found that normal weight teens who perceive themselves as fat are more likely to grow up to be fat.
"Perceiving themselves as fat even though they are not may actually cause normal weight children to become obese as adults," says Koenraad Cuypers, a researcher ...
Research at Bangor University has identified a switch in cells that may help to kill tumors with heat. Prostate cancer and other localized tumors can be effectively treated by a combination of heat and an anti-cancer drug that damages the genes. Behind this novel therapy is the enigmatic ability of heat to switch off essential survival mechanisms in human cells. Although thermotherapy is now more widely used, the underlying principles are still unclear.
In a recent publication in the Journal of Cell Science (http://jcs.biologists.org/content/early/2012/07/10/jcs.104075.abstract) ...
Active video games, also known as "exergames," are not the perfect solution to the nation's sedentary ways, but they can play a role in getting some people to be more active.
Michigan State University's Wei Peng reviewed published research of studies of these games and says that most of the AVGs provide only "light-to-moderate" intensity physical activity.
And that, she says, is not nearly as good as what she calls "real-life exercise."
"For those not engaging in real-life exercise, this may be a good step toward this," said Peng, an assistant professor of telecommunication, ...
Stressed and non-stressed persons use different brain regions and different strategies when learning. This has been reported by the cognitive psychologists PD Dr. Lars Schwabe and Professor Oliver Wolf from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in the Journal of Neuroscience. Non-stressed individuals applied a deliberate learning strategy, while stressed subjects relied more on their gut feeling. "These results demonstrate for the first time that stress has an influence on which of the different memory systems the brain turns on," said Lars Schwabe.
The experiment: Stress due to ...
VIDEO:
With the aid of tiny silicon tubes and one of Europe's most sophisticated centres for microscopy, scientists from University of Copenhagen have been able for the first time to observe...
Click here for more information.
Chronic infections are a large and growing problem throughout the developed world, and intensive research is being conducted in ways to combat the recalcitrant bacteria. When bacteria aggregate into so-called biofilm, they become resistant to antibiotics. ...
Contrary to popular belief, purified drinking water from home faucets contains millions to hundreds of millions of widely differing bacteria per gallon, and scientists have discovered a plausible way to manipulate those populations of mostly beneficial microbes to potentially benefit consumers. Their study appears in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology.
Lutgarde Raskin and colleagues Ameet Pinto and Chuanwu Xi explain that municipal water treatment plants typically try to minimize the growth of microbes in the huge filters that remove small particles and substances ...
With the best explosive detectors often unable to sniff out the tiny amounts of TNT released from terrorist bombs in airports and other public places, scientists are reporting a potential solution. Their research in ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry describes development of a device that concentrates TNT vapors in the air so that they become more detectable.
Yushan Yan and colleagues point out that TNT and other conventional explosives are the mainstays of terrorist bombs and the anti-personnel mines that kill or injure more than 15,000 people annually in war-torn countries. ...
