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Biomedical subjects

A H Hawkins

Publications and source records attributed to A H Hawkins.

14 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1999

Evaluating students on an interdisciplinary primary care clerkship at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine.

With funding from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Generalist Physician Initiative, the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine created a community-based primary care clerkship in general pediatrics, general internal medicine, and family and community medicine, in which third-year students spend a month in a small town, rural area, or urban underserved medical community. In addition to linking students with preceptors who would teach the clinical skills essential to primary care practice, the medical school set out to teach and to evaluate knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors unique to primary care. This paper describes the three-part teaching tool/evaluation developed to address (1) a student's recognition of the characteristics of primary care (learning objectives assignment), (2) a student's ability to appreciate the multiple nonmedical factors influencing a patient's health and experience of illness (family project), and (3) a student's ability to solve clinical problems (clinical reasoning examination). The authors describe how these evaluation methods are linked with the clerkship's goals and objectives and how they yield a richer portrait of the student's performance than the traditional preceptor's evaluation alone can provide. They also discuss the relationship between students' performances on the primary care clerkship and their performances in other clinical clerkships. Similar clinical experiences in primary care should focus on features unique to primary care medicine in both teaching and evaluation.

Clinical Clerkship↗
PubMed1996

Literature and medical ethics.

The essays in this Journal issue offer examples of how textual analysis, literary theory, and the reading and writing of literature can contribute to an understanding of ethical issues in medicine. The editors' purpose in such an issue is to stimulate discussion between philosopher-ethicists and literary scholars whose work concerns this topic. With the concluding essays by editors Clouser and Hawkins, this discussion begins.

Ethics↗
PubMed1996

Literature, philosophy, and medical ethics: let the dialogue go on.

This is a reply to Dan Clouser's philosophical commentary on the essays in this issue. Important assumptions that condition his perspective on the essays are identified and analyzed. Attention is drawn to his unhistorical emphasis on the exclusive importance of philosophy in ethical thought, and his resulting insistence that any discipline wishing to contribute to biomedical discourse must adopt the assumptions and methodologies of philosophy. Clouser's "three tenets" are examined, and then the question of what literature, considered in terms of its own aims and methodologies, has to offer to medical ethics. Genuine dialogue about medical ethics between philosophers and literary scholars is both desirable and important, but becomes possible only if the methods and insights of each discipline are honored in the pursuit of the overall goals they hold in common.

Ethical Analysis↗
PubMed1995

Literature and medicine: contributions to clinical practice.

Introduced to U.S. medical schools in 1972, the field of literature and medicine contributes methods and texts that help physicians develop skills in the human dimensions of medical practice. Five broad goals are met by including the study of literature in medical education: 1) Literary accounts of illness can teach physicians concrete and powerful lessons about the lives of sick people; 2) great works of fiction about medicine enable physicians to recognize the power and implications of what they do; 3) through the study of narrative, the physician can better understand patients' stories of sickness and his or her own personal stake in medical practice; 4) literary study contributes to physicians' expertise in narrative ethics; and 5) literary theory offers new perspectives on the work and the genres of medicine. Particular texts and methods have been found to be well suited to the fulfillment of each of these goals. Chosen from the traditional literary canon and from among the works of contemporary and culturally diverse writers, novels, short stories, poetry, and drama can convey both the concrete particularity and the metaphorical richness of the predicaments of sick people and the challenges and rewards offered to their physicians. In more than 20 years of teaching literature to medical students and physicians, practitioners of literature and medicine have clarified its conceptual frameworks and have identified the means by which its studies strengthen the human competencies of doctoring, which are a central feature of the art of medicine.

Clinical Medicine↗
PubMed1982

Influencing leisure choices of autisticlike children.

A leisure education program was implemented with three autisticlike children. Based on an assessment phase, potential recreational activities were designated as high interest or low interest for each subject. During the leisure educational training phase, choices were provided between high- and low-interest activities under three alternating conditions. During the Prompt and Praise condition the instructor prompted the subject to engage in a low-interest activity for 2 minutes and then allowed a free choice for 2 minutes. During the Praise Anything condition the instructor allowed free choices every 2 minutes. During the Token condition the subject was provided a free choice every 2 minutes, but a token economy was established contingent on engaging in low-interest activities. The Prompt and Praise condition was superior to the other two conditions in encouraging participation in low-interest recreational activities.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Restoring the patient's voice: the case of Gilda Radner.

In the past few years, the medical case report has been studied as a document that evidences the way the patient and, by extension, the experiential and subjective aspects of an illness tend to be marginalized in contemporary medical theory and practice. First-person narratives about illness, our popular "pathographies," may in part represent our attempt as a culture to respond to this problem of "the vanishing patient." A rich source of information about patient experience, pathographies can be useful to us in locating specific issues in the medical enterprise that need understanding and perhaps require correction. Gilda Radner's It's Always Something demonstrates how two important issues--both neglected in the conventional medical history--powerfully affect the medical enterprise: the hopes, expectations, and wishes of the experiencing patient, and the perceived attitudes and demeanor of the patient's physicians. The restoration of patient and physician to the "history" is important not only because it reminds us of the personal dimension of the medical enterprise, but also because it alerts us to problems of attitude and action that bear directly on diagnosis, course of treatment, and the therapeutic transaction.

Complementary Therapies↗