Promoting self-awareness and reflection through an experiential Mind-Body Skills course for first year medical students

Abstract

Background-This research examines student evaluations of their experience and attitudes in an 11 week mind-body skills course for first year medical students.Aims-The aim is to understand the impact of this course on students' self-awareness, selfreflection, and self-care as part of their medical education experience.Methods-This study uses a qualitative content analysis approach to data analysis. The data are 492 verbatim responses from 82 students to six open-ended questions about the students' experiences and attitudes after a mind-body skills course. These questions queried students' attitudes about mind-body medicine, complementary medicine, and their future as physicians using these approaches.Results-The data revealed five central themes in students' responses: connections, self discovery, stress relief, learning, and medical education.Conclusions-Mind-body skills groups represent an experiential approach to teaching mindbody techniques that can enable students to achieve self-awareness and self-reflection in order to engage in self-care and to gain exposure to mind-body medicine while in medical school. IntroductionMedical school is a challenging environment in which students are confronted with multiple psychological and physical stressors; teaching students how to deal with these stressors is important for their health and well-being. Training physicians to focus on self-awareness, self-reflection and self-care may produce more reflective and well balanced doctors who may provide better patient care. HHS Public Access Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript Author ManuscriptOne approach to helping students to deal with the stressors of medical school focuses on teaching mind-body skills (MBS) that promote self-awareness, self-reflection and self-care. While medical teaching on self-reflection and professionalism is more wide spread in the UK (Maudsley & Fryer-Edwards 2003), curricula focusing on MBS and the promotion of self-awareness and self-reflection is less well established in medical schools in the United States (Dannoff & Corbet 2005). The learning objectives of self-awareness and reflection are often challenging to integrate into a medical school curriculum and equally difficult to assess (Boenink et al. 2004). There have been a variety of interventions employed to help students alleviate stress, promote well-being and self-reflection, this paper describes the results of an experiential intervention focusing on MBS techniques to achieve these outcomes.Medical students have been surveyed about the physical and psychological challenges of medical school since the early 1970s (Pitts et al. 1961;Linn & Zeppa 1984;Firth 1986;Wolf 1989;Mosley et al. 1994;Stewart et al. 1997). Findings of increased stress levels have motivated a variety of interventions designed to provide sensitivity training (Dashef et al. 1974;Hilberman et al. 1975), self-awareness (Cadden et al. 1969), self-reflection (Killion & Todnem 1991;Maudsley & Fryer-Edwards 2003;Boenink et al. 2004), sharing of feeli...

Making Better Doctors – Using Mind-Body Medicine Skills as a Self-Care Element in Medical Education at the Charité University Medical School

“…Self-awareness is defined as students' understanding of how their personal histories and current personal lives as well as their values, attitudes, and biases affect their care of patients so that they can use their emotional responses in patient care for their own and their patients' benefit [4]. Target groups for this course at the Georgetown University are medical students, graduate students, and faculty members.…”

“…When using an experiential approach to teach MBM skills, students can achieve self-awareness and self-reflection in order to engage in self-care [4]. MBM takes into account the connectedness between the mind and body and its effect on overall health.…”

“…In the USA, self-care and wellness for students plays an increasing role, as shown by leading examples such as that of the University of Maryland, which has developed a whole wellness and health care center for its students and staff (www.health.umd.edu). A prime example for a well-implemented, experiential self-awareness program that is based on developing MBM skills is the course at the Georgetown University (Washington, USA), which has been running for more than 10 years [4].…”

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“…The MBS program followed the Georgetown University School of Medicine (GUSOM) protocol, as described elsewhere [8]. Participants met with the MBS program facilitator individually for 1 hour every week, over 7 consecutive weeks.…”

“…Mindfulness-based techniques are widely known to reduce psychological symptoms of distress and enhance quality of life [6][7][8]. The use of mindfulness-based techniques, such as meditation, relaxation exercises, biofeedback, guided imagery and journal writing, aim at the cultivation of a nonjudgmental awareness of whatever is happening at each successive moment of perception [6].…”