Prairie Doc Perspective Learning to perceive: Visual thinking strategies in medical education

By Donna Merkt, director of the South Dakota Art Museum at South Dakota State University 

Effective medical diagnosis depends not just on looking, but on truly perceiving. Recognizing this, many medical training programs have adopted Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) discussions about art to enhance students’ skills in nuanced observation, inference, and communication. In 2004, Harvard Medical …