The Human Touch
March 16, 2011|Academics
Russell Ford greeted the five students in his medical humanities senior seminar late Tuesday afternoon with a bit of fictitious good news.
“Congratulations, you’ve all just won the lottery,” he told the class. “You get one million dollars in cash. There are no strings attached, it’ s tax-free, and you have no outstanding debts. “
Ford’s students, arrayed in a semi-circle around their professor in a tiny classroom in Daniels Hall, didn’t bother celebrating. They seemed to be waiting for some inevitable bit of bad news to follow. Ford, an assistant professor of philosophy, didn’t disappoint them.
“The thing is, your neighbor needs fifty dollars. If he doesn’t get it, he won’t be able to make his house payment, and the family will lose their home and be out on the street,” Ford told the class. Then he asked a question: Are you morally obligated to give your neighbor fifty dollars? “You might all agree that taking fifty dollars out of your big pile of cash would be a nice thing to do. But is it something you must do, morally speaking?”
Ford’s seminar is one of the requirements of Elmhurst’s medical humanities minor, a program for students bound for medical school or otherwise preparing for careers in health care. It focuses on what Ford calls the humanistic components of health care—ethics, communication, the relationships between caregiver and patient. The idea is that being able to reason through ethical dilemmas and communicate your positions clearly should be a part of every caregiver’s standard toolkit.
The million-dollar question Ford posed at the beginning of class served as an introduction to a mini-debate: Is it enough for caregivers to meet the professional standard of doing no harm, or is there an obligation to actively help others, even at some risk or cost to the helper?
The students agreed that as hypothetical lottery-winners they had an obligation to help their neighbors in need. But then Ford complicated matters: What if the neighbor needed not fifty dollars, but five thousand? What if he needed fifty thousand? What if the neighbor was a jerk?
“We’re using the same sorts of problem-solving and reasoning techniques they can use as professionals,” Ford said after class. “There’s not always an obvious answer, but there have to be defensible reasons. That can be frustrating for students, but I’d rather have them get frustrated with all the possibilities in class, than be frustrated in the real world, where the consequences are so profound.”
Elmhurst introduced the medical humanities minor in 2007. The timing has turned out to be excellent. Even as health care professions become more specialized, medical schools seem to be on the lookout for the kinds of well-rounded students who thrive as well in a liberal arts seminar as they do in a lab or clinical setting. Medical schools “just gobble up” such students, Frank Mittermeyer, director of Elmhurst’s Dr. Dennis J. Patterson Center for the Health Professions, has said.
“The practice of medicine is becoming more humanistic,” Ford said. “It’s more about bringing patients into the decision-making process and less about the doctor as god.”
That dynamic can pose its own ethical problems. Each of Ford’s students is preparing a case study analyzing what happens when a caregiver’s desire to do good comes into conflict with a patient’s autonomy—for example, when a patient in dire need of a blood transfusion refuses one on religious grounds. Each student will take a turn leading the class discussion for an afternoon.
“Health care is not just technical,” Ford said. “When our students are doing their internships or shadowing, they see the problem-solving techniques and ethical principles we talk about in class play out in the professional world.”
