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Jacob Balin's avatar

Hey. Current medical student here. I deeply, deeply resonate with what you wrote here. Throughout medical school, I have had a sense of the knowledge I am learning having been robbed of its embodied juiciness/ essence. I have this vague sense of medicine/ the healing art as being something deep and archetypal within me, which has been bent out of shape and somewhat brutalized by the educational process. I may well not go on to residency, and even if I do, I will have to grapple with the issue of knowledge and healing as deeply disembodied. Thanks a lot for writing.

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River Kenna's avatar

Thanks for sharing this,, you’re definitely not alone there, you’re the third or fourth person I’ve heard say sth like this either after medical school or a medical career. Sth has to change over there.

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Jacob Balin's avatar

Thanks. I also loved this piece because I have gone through the imaginal exercise many times of "what would a more psychospiritually integrated medical education look like?". One thing that I think is cool about your idea is that, unlike medical education, an embodied grad school doesn't need to have much overhead-- i.e., you could actually generate a minimal viable product with not that many resources.

Whereas, one of the major hurdles to reforming medical education is that you'd actually need an institution to be accredited, which takes a huge amount of resources, requires a relationship with a hospital, etc, and to even be accredited would require a med school to teach what the national licensing board considers standard western medical curricula. So, there's a ton of institutional, cultural, and legal hurdles that mean that even if you have a solid 5-10% of doctors who desire a more embodied curriculum (which is in my experience probably about the number that have such a desire), there's not really a way to just break off and sort of "do our own thing" as regards medical education.

/rant

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