AMA Journal of Ethics

Visual, musical, and poetic forms of creative expression have embodied healing in many cultures for millennia. Research methods based in these artistic forms have grown in prominence as the enterprise of health care has been led by kindred disciplines of bioethics and humanities to interrogate overmedicalization, to resist hyperfocus on measurability when the cost is neglect of narratives and experiences, and to recognize tendencies that too often privilege outcomes over processes. What we’ve learned is that medicine has much to learn from and contribute to the arts, and that the arts have much to learn from and contribute to medicine.