Workshop
The Bodies of “Others”:
Compassionate Care in the Health
Professions
Each patient you see has many bodies. Often, we think of the structural
and functional bodies that seemingly present for diagnosis and
treatment. However, the cultural, emotional, and spiritual bodies of
increasingly diverse patient populations cry out for, and materially
impact, effective care choices made every day in examination,
consultation, and hospital rooms. This experiential workshop is
designed to expand all health-care professionals’ potential for
providing diagnosis and treatment that are consonant with their
patients’ worldviews and values.
First, through visualization, roleplay, and on-our-feet investigation,
we discover the felt experience of being, or being treated as, a
cultural “other” in Western health care’s own definable cultural
context.
We then reconstruct and re-enact specific scenarios of healing
indigenous to specific first-generation Latin American and Asian
immigrant populations that may frame both their own and their
children’s and grandchildren’s experience in American health-care
settings. Entering into, writing about, and debriefing our experience
of other cultures’—and our own—relationships to touch, pain, authority,
and embodiment itself, we consider implications for choices we make in
communicating and partnering with patients in our own inevitably
multicultural dramas.
Finally, we practice the cultivation of behaviors and identify
productive avenues toward traditional cultural resources that can
enable diverse patients to feel cared for, to understand the medical
implications of their conditions, and to partner with their providers
to make holistic, sound, and culturally integrative health-care
decisions.
Sara K. Schneider, Ph.D., performance
anthropologist, professor, and author of
three books on body and identity, directs the Center for Bodylore and
Learning, linking public education about global cultures with the
professional development of teachers, healthcare professionals, and
clergy.
To discuss your organization's
needs, contact Sara at sks@thinkingdr.com or
312.593.2345.
All
materials © Sara K. Schneider 2010