“If you take the time to write and reflect, it helps you and the patient.”
-Arooba Almas, DO '18
Arooba Almas, DO '18
continues to take shape across the country, she asks us to ponder how the medical profession can harness the power of story. To impact public policy? To transform our healthcare system? To inspire student and physician leaders? She asks us to consider the possibilities.
Publish or Perish
As the symposium continued, four UNE students and graduates shared their own experiences with storytelling and healing for the segment, "My Insides Black and White: Narrative Arts and the Health Professions – Student Perspectives.” Arooba Almas, DO ’18 is a recent UNE COM graduate currently completing her first year of residency at the ECHN Manchester Family Medicine Residency Program in Connecticut. She chose Family Medicine because of a strong desire to promote healing and wellness in her community. Narrative medicine has developed as a passion of hers, and she continues to use reflective writing to become both a better human and physician.
She first encountered narrative writing with her classmates at a Columbia University workshop in New York City. The program exposed them to creative and challenging exercises in themes such as empathy, ethics, bearing witness, active listening, and reflective reasoning. The six UNE COM students who attended (Julet Baltonado, Nicole Butuzov, John Cooper, Natasha Neal, Nehal Shah and Arooba Almas) brought their experience and zeal back to campus and founded Akesis, the online journal of narrative medicine, in order to provide a creative and reflective outlet for students. The word Akesis means healing or curing in Greek, so the name was fitting. Although similar initiatives were already in place within the COM curriculum, she believed that students as a whole did not fully realize the value of what they were being asked to do. The founding members saw a potential benefit for the UNE COM community.