Last week I presented a General Medicine Grand Rounds at Maine Medical Center.

The talk posed a nice opportunity to write up some of my more recent work on clinical uncertainty and key principles for managing it, gleaned in arts experiences. Take a look:

Clinical uncertainty is a difficult topic. More often than not, we are on many sides of it at any given time. It is scary, painful, confusing, discouraging, and not easy to talk about. But, given the massive costs to our society’s lives and treasure, we have to find a way to talk about it across contexts, and especially in the clinical context. I believe that experiences in art set up a safe context to start the conversation. These exercises are my attempt to connect arts experiences to essential principles of skill and knowledge in quality and safety.

Thank you to Dr. Stephen Hayes for sharing a case as part of the presentation, and for doing so with such generous and courageous spirit. Thank you to Drs. Robert Trowbridge and Michael Roy for the invitation.

And thanks to Jennifer DePrizio and the Portland Museum of Art for collaborating on a short-format workshop for a smaller group of the dynamic human beings who provide care, education and leadership at Maine Medical. My favorite part of the visit came from this session, during an ongoing disagreement about this Helen Levitt photograph. Is there something seriously wrong here, or are the kids ok? The conversation pivoted when one participant’s speaking up about the lightness she saw in the picture. Out of a multifaceted discussion of something’s-wrong-ness, she raised the possibility of joy, celebration.

Later, she confessed it was the first time she’d ever expressed a point of view that differed so distinctly from that of another participant, who held a position senior to hers on one of the teams she worked on. In her words: “I’m going to disagree with him all the time now.”

My work here is done, people. (OK, just kidding, it has only just begun, but I relish the lessons learned).

Image credits:

Margo Kren, Somewhere along the Way, Part II, 1997. Oil on canvas. KSU, Friends of the Beach Museum of Art purchase. 2000.198.

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with The Portrait of Dr. Farill, 1951. Oil on Canvas.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, The Wrestlers, 1914. Plaster. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 65.1683.1.