The value of family medicine/general medicine lies in its distinctiveness from academic medicine. It replaced categories with process and relationships. In its scientific method, emotional experience plays an important role. General medicine is unique in the medical field because it transcends the mind-body duality. Therefore, general practitioners should be encouraged to use a non-conventional approach when addressing the problems that arise in the consultation. Fostering reflective practice is an integral part of continuing professional development and training in general practice. Poetry is a method of reflection that can allow physicians to reflect on concepts and experiences. Haiku is a form of traditional Japanese poetry. It consists of a short poem, generally composed of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively (although this meter is flexible, and in English, syllable count is based strictly on pronunciation, not spelling). It is unrhymed and aims to express, in just three lines, a brief and sincere feeling, usually arising from the contemplation of nature or from feelings about love, death, illness, pain, or any lived experience. Using haikus in medical education is an excellent resource for activating critical thinking and humanizing medicine. In the end, medicine and poetry share the same thing: the art of observing and listening attentively. This article presents an illustrative case that gives rise to 6 haykus to reflect on the basic concept of family medicine of “Bio-psycho-social care.”

General/family medicine is unique in the medical field because it transcends the mind-body duality. Therefore, general practitioners should be encouraged to use unconventional ways of acquiring knowledge. Poetry can be a source of knowledge by providing us with perspectives on reality, and in this sense, it can also have a cognitive impact on us and our understanding of the world. Science and poetry have more in common than most people realize. Both rely on metaphor, which is as crucial to scientific discovery as it is to lyrical description [1, 2].

Haikus is a traditional Japanese form of poetry. Using haikus in medical education is an excellent resource for activating reflection on concepts and experiences, critical and ethical thinking, creative abilities, and the humanization of medicine. Because they are such short texts, they require students to fill in the gaps with their own clinical judgment. For students heavily focused on linear, detail-oriented facts haikus act as an outlet to stimulate creativity and process feelings encourage to identify the most salient features of difficult topics (such as the fundamental concepts of general medicine) and pair them with supporting scientific evidence; It is a beautiful project to use haiku writing to help students process the emotional weight of clinical care, explore practical challenges, and articulate the essence of health and illness [3-8]. In this article, 6 haykus are used to reflect on “Bio-psycho-social care”, a basic concept of family medicine.

Matthew, 45 years old, with a family history of acute myocardial infarction at a young age, presents with a glycated hemoglobin of 8.5% (poorly controlled type 2 diabetes). He works as a truck driver on night routes, which prevents him from maintaining a regular diet, and confesses that the stress of delivery deadlines causes him to smoke a pack a day.

Pedagogical Key

Engel's model expressed visually. Health and illness as a multifactorial and interconnected phenomenon.

Discussion Questions

Can the biological, psychological, and social thre ads in Matthew's cardiovascular risk be identified? Is it helpful to reprimand the patient for smoking without addressing his work environment?

Haukus For Thought

Wind, soil, and water, they all sustain the flower (on its long journey. Mind, home, and genetics, three threads that outline and draw the root of illness. We are the echo of the world in which we live and where we suffer.
Your home and your fears matter just as much or more than your own heartbeat.

Invisible web: the deep wound inside the mind bleeds upon the skin.
Mind, flesh, and homeland, wind blowing through the branches, heals the entire tree.

Concept of Bio-Psycho-Social Care

In 1977, Engel proposed a paradigm capable of scientifically incorporating the human domain into the experience of illness. The biopsychosocial model identifies biological, psychological, and social factors as ever-present elements with interrelated influences on health and illness. The family physician with a biopsychosocial approach will focus on the highest possible levels of systemic organization (family, community), rather than on the lowest possible levels of systemic organization (cells, organs). It should be noted that the defining characteristic of family medicine is the understanding of the patient and their illness based not only on symptoms and signs, but also on psychological and social factors [10-17].