Keynote I. Jerome Groopman, MD, Recanati Chair of Medicine, and Pamela Hartzband, MD, Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School
Your Medical Mind: The Art of Clinical Decision Making
Drs. Groopman and Hartzband will present a new way to make the best medical decisions. They reveal that each of us has a “medical mind,” a highly individual approach to weighing the risks and benefits of treatment. Are you a minimalist or a maximalist, a believer or a doubter? Do you look for natural healing or the latest technology? They explain how pitfalls in thinking and the way statistics are presented can mislead both patients and doctors. They weave vivid narratives from real patients with insights from recent research to demonstrate how to arrive at choices that serve the individual best.
Keynote II. William Mobley, MD, PhD, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, recipient of the Zenith Award and the Temple Award from the Alzheimer’s Association, and the co-creator, with the Dalai Lama, of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University
How Do We Educate Physicians to be Skilled in Empathy and Compassion?
The rigors of patient care tax the ability of physicians and nurses to understand and provide compassionate care. It is evident that the ability to listen and care is more readily practiced by some of us than others. Our profession values these abilities and points to skillful individuals as role models. But mimicry and mentorship alone appear to be inadequate. In part, it is difficult to scale from one mentor to very many trainees. In addition, what might be mentored and taught is poorly understood and vaguely defined. An alternative approach is to use modern neuroscientific methods to explore the brain bases of empathy and compassion, develop programs that can objectively be shown to enhance the ability to engage in these cognitive states, and scale effective programs of training so as to make them generally available. I will review existing insights into the neurobiology of empathy and compassion and discuss early attempts at building training programs. The overall goal is the cultivation of a health care force skilled in empathy and compassion and therefore able to listen and care for patients without risking emotional overload and burnout.
Keynote III. Pedro “Joe” Greer, Jr., MD, Chair, Department of Humanities, Health and Society, Florida International University College of Medicine, Winner of the MacArthur “Genius” Award and Presidential Medal of Freedom
Why We Should!
A motivational keynote on why we as professionals should take the lead in making our society better, in other words save the world.