[Lara]

G'day Bobby and everyone,
I found this article in my travels and I thought I'd post it here.

It's more a general article regarding teaching empathy to medical students I guess and I thought it was great but didn't know where to post it on NT, so figured you might appreciate it.

http://www.med.nyu.edu/communication.../assets/p32.pdf
Walk a Mile in My Wheelchair
NYU Physician / Spring / 2007

One student, all five fingers of his dominant hand wrapped in masking tape and his other hand behind his back, tried to write a sentence dictated by his partner. Another student, her non-dominant hand cloaked in three layers of athletic socks and her other hand behind her back, tried to remove one sheet of paper after another from a stack of 15. Yet another student, both of his hands behind his back, tried to use non-verbal means to communicate to his partner how to hold a cup of water so that he could take a sip.

The exercises form a key component of the School of Medicine’s newly established Disability Curriculum, one of the first programs of its kind in the country.

“Research shows that for a variety of reasons empathy affects medical outcomes,” explains Alex Moroz, M.D. (’96), Director of Medical Education in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine. “But medical education hasn’t caught up with the distribution of disability in the population. NYU is ideally suited for such a pioneering program. The patient always comes first here, and the Rusk Institute has decades of experience working with the disabled.”

<snipped article> more at the site.