Essay On Ambiguity

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Recommended: Importance of education in healthcare

As a medical professional, there are many different aspects of the job. Most of the journey towards the profession is filled with long hours of studying all the technical terms and symptoms for a diagnosis. While all these aspects are important, humanities and fine arts aspect of learning should be incorporated into the studies of the current and future healthcare professionals as well. Literature and art impact and improve many different aspects of improving one’s skills as a carer, including, ethics, self-reflection, aesthetics and interpretation, empathy, and ambiguity. All parts of these aspects are interconnected with one another, with one aspect also enhancing the others, however, I believe the most important aspects are the ethics, empathy, and ambiguity that in which studying literature and art can provide for the learning healthcare provider. There is no doubt that …show more content…

Life is ambiguous, and this also applies in the medical field. Physicians must know how the ambiguity of life and unexpected situations may arise in medicine and the ability to understand different paths to take and the fact that different outcomes may occur other than that which was hypothesized. Literature and art help us learn to tolerate ambiguity: questions or problems for which there is not a single “right” answer. Literature and the arts are inherently ambiguous in nature, and it would be beneficial to a physician to study literature and fine arts to improve their understanding that not all things are going to turn out as we expect them to, and that not all things are what they seem to appear to be. Example of life not going to plan can be found in literature in both “Am I Going Blind?” by Frank Bruni and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. In both of these texts, life doesn’t go as planned and both protagonists have to learn to take a different road in life that they were not expecting to

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