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. In this article, an illustrative case is presented that gives rise to six haikus to reflect on the basic concept of family medicine of "Doctor-patient clinical interview in general medicine."

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 [1-3].

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 [4-9]. In this article, 6 haykus are used to reflect on “Integrality/holism”, a basic concept of family medicine.

You go in to help a colleague. You see that during consultations he barely looks patients in the eye; he spends his time typing on the computer while staring at the screen, interrupting patients before they've even been speaking for 20 seconds to speed up the waiting list of 45 patients.

Haukus For Thought

Two birds close together, chatting on a wooden branch in the early dawn.

Pure anamnesis: questions that reveal to us the undetectable.

A sacred meeting where the physical pain turns  into living words.

Come and sit close by, tell me without any rush exactly what hurts.
The daily ritual of looking into their eyes across the work desk.
Two sit down as one, the old journal opens up filled with many pains.

Pedagogical Key

The medical interview as a technical tool, but also as a space for sacred human communication.

Discussion Questions

What valuable clinical information is lost when we destroy the patient's narrative? How can we balance the pressure of time in clinical practice with the dignity of the clinical encounter?

Concept Of Doctor-Patient Clinical Interview

The interview is a technique, channel, and space for communication, where the doctor-patient relationship is established and developed. A good interview fosters a good doctor-patient relationship. The interview integrates communication and clinical reasoning; it connects the biomedical and psychosocial aspects of clinical care. The doctor-patient relationship is fundamental for both diagnosis and treatment. In 75-80% of patients, the interview leads to the diagnosis (in the remaining cases, examination and complementary tests are needed, but even here the diagnosis is more complete when a good clinical interview has been conducted) [10-19].