ABSTRACT
Medicine and medical education are put on the couch, and their binding, historically accrued symptoms are isolated and treated. The treatment regime is based on a unique model first developed at Peninsula Medical School, UK: the Values Prism. This posits that medical education is hampered where it is framed by technocratic ideals and instrumental reasoning. Here, a “training”, rather than an “education”, mentality draws increasingly on reductive frames such as skills-based retrospective competence approaches (rather than prospective “capability”) and fixed outcomes (rather than process-based innovation). The Values Prism shows a white light of instrumental/functional medical education passing through a prism that is a medical humanities process, to produce a spectrum of colours standing for deeper quality, intensity, and complexity – embracing ethical, aesthetic, political, and transcendental (meaning) values. The key translational media are productive metaphors. Medicine’s key ailments – intolerance of ambiguity, resistance to democratic habits, unintended production of insensibility, and lack of psychotherapeutic acumen amongst medical students and junior doctors (also resulting in poor self-care) – can be addressed through tailored medical humanities interventions.
