Intro to Health Humanities

Catalog description

Health Humanities is a growing transdisciplinary field of education, research, and practice that addresses some unique imperatives of our historical moment in terms of the crisis in health care. Health Humanities inform health care in necessary ways, redressing the old models that marginalized the patient by privileging professional expertise over lived experience and partitioning the human body according to rigid specializations. Students will understand the contribution of the health humanities to a vision of care for the whole person, examining health experiences from the point of view of the patient, practitioner, and public in an integrative way that examines the social conditions informing health conditions and outcomes. Students should be able to read and understand transdisciplinary perspectives important to the field of health humanities, the concepts of unconscious bias, interdependence, storytelling as a determinant of health, and be able to evaluate health care practices through these lenses. Students will understand the capacity of narrative to critically reflect on issues of power, authority, and justice in healthcare settings & develop their abilities to identify the multi-faceted and unique identities each patient brings to the clinical context. ELECTIVE COURSE intended for students pursuing a health professions major or related field.