Exploring Empathy: A Report on How Visual Art Can Foster Understanding and Compassion

Empathic communication and perspective-taking are essential skills for any healthcare provider, and they must be developed during the training process. Numerous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of incorporating the humanities into teaching soft skills. We designed an art project in the course of Medical Physiology for optometry students to help them understand how patients with different eye diseases and chronic somatic conditions perceive the world. This is a post hoc quasi-experimental study. The assignment "See the World Through My Eyes" was part of the Medical Physiology program. A total of 156 first-year optometry students were enrolled in the program from 2021 to 2023 and completed the assignment. The students were supposed to choose an art object from a copyright-free museum's online collection and transform it to reflect how patients might perceive it. Post-project feedback was used to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention. Approximately 65% of participants reported a significant knowledge increase, and 77% reported a substantial enhancement in perspective-taking. The common topics emerging from the narrative reflections were "clinical case presentation," "patient's perspective: understanding and explaining to others," "assumptions/stigmatization," "preparation for future profession," "pathological mechanisms," and "teamwork/collaborations." We believe that the project will help enhance observation and interpretation skills, create awareness of patients' possible visual abnormalities, promote empathy, compassion, and perspective-taking, and allow students to recognize assumptions and mitigate biases.