The Healer’s Art Course Offers Healthcare Professionals an Innovative Exploration of Service, Healing Relationship, Reverence for Life, and Compassionate Care

At RISHI at Pure Healthcare, we’re honored and privileged to offer The Healer’s Art ™ , an innovative discovery model course in values clarification and professionalism originally created for first and second-year medical students. Designed in 1991 by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, the course offers a safe learning environment for a personal in-depth exploration of the time-honored values of service, healing relationship, reverence for life, and compassionate care. 

More than 100 medical schools have been trained to offer The Healer’s Art course. In addition to medical students and medical professionals, The Healer’s Art is now offered to students of veterinarian, physician assistant and physical therapy programs.  

The course utilizes principles of adult education, contemplative studies, humanistic and transpersonal psychology, cognitive psychology, formation education, creative arts, and storytelling to present and explore human dimensions of medicine rarely discussed in medical training.  

Topics covered include: 

• Deep listening 
• Presence 
• Acceptance 
• Loss 
• Grief 
• Healing 
• Relationship 
• Encounters with awe and mystery  
• Self-care practices 

Our curriculum enables students to uncover and strengthen their altruistic values, sense of calling, and intention to serve that led them to medicine, creating a firm foundation for meeting the challenging demands of contemporary medical training and practice. 

Since 1991, we have trained hundreds of medical school faculty to offer The Healer’s Art course at their medical schools both here and abroad. In a rigorous standardized course evaluation, the thousands of students worldwide who take the course every year report that it fills a gap in their existing curriculum and enables them to make the practice of medicine uniquely their own. 

Vivek Murthy, MD, U.S. Surgeon General, acknowledged The Healer’s Art Course in his U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on “Addressing Health Worker Burnout: Building a Thriving Health Workforce” in summer 2022. To view and download a copy of the advisory, click here.  

Dr. Murthy gave a wonderful shout-out to The Healer’s Art Course in the advisory report as a course that supports learner well-being. He specifically mentions The Healer’s Art Course on page 46 under the bullet point “Develop integrated programs focused on supporting student wellness.” 

Faculty are often as profoundly affected by the course as the students, reporting a renewal of their enthusiasm for teaching and their love of medicine. Each summer, RISHI offers intensive faculty training to enable medical school faculty to bring the course to their school.  

The Center for the Study of The Healer’s Art (CSHA) conducts ongoing national research on the outcomes of the course and has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals. For more information, click here. 

To learn more about The Healer’s Art, click here. 

To learn more about RISHI at Pure Healthcare and how our programs can help you find deeper meaning, click here.