The CAHH Health Humanities Rounds, launched in Winter 2026, offer CAHH members access to synchronous, online educational opportunities that bring together scholars, health professionals, educators, artists, learners, and community members working in the health humanities. These interactive rounds create space for shared learning, critical dialogue, and reflection across disciplines.

In collaboration with Dalhousie University CPDME Humanities Series

Canadian Association for Health Humanities Rounds

You Can’t Get the News From Poems, But You Can Learn to Love the Type 1 Diagnostic Reasoning That Can Be Found There

Poetry and Tolerating Ambiguity in Medical Education Contexts

Presenter
Shane Neilson, MD, PhD

Date Jan 29th, 2026  8PM Atlantic time on zoom. Register at this link - LINK

Download the event flyer

Objectives

Participants will:

·       Become familiar with Type 1 and Type 2 diagnostic reasoning

·       Understand key epistemological problems in medicine, including biomedicine’s certainty paradigm and its role in creating an anxious learning and practice environment

·       Explore how poetry supports the toleration of ambiguity in medical students and practicing clinicians

·       Learn how poetry can be taught not as an adornment or “frill,” but as a tool to improve diagnostic accuracy

Description

Poetry is rarely taught as poetry in medical education. When it does appear, it is often used instrumentally—as a way to increase “empathy” or as a low-bar reflective exercise. Narrative medicine, by contrast, has been more readily embraced, particularly for its ability to support Type 2 diagnostic reasoning: the slow, analytic integration of history, physical examination, and investigations.

Medical education excels at teaching students how to gather and organize information to arrive at rational differential diagnoses. Type 1 diagnostic reasoning, however—rapid, intuitive, and pattern-based—is commonly believed to emerge only after years of clinical exposure. As a result, medical education has largely neglected the possibility that Type 1 reasoning can be cultivated rather than merely acquired over time.

This session argues that poetry offers a powerful and underused pathway for developing Type 1 diagnostic reasoning. Like Type 1 thinking, poetry is epiphanic, grounded in sudden insight, resonance, and meaning-making under conditions of uncertainty. By engaging seriously with poetry, learners can practice sitting with ambiguity, recognizing patterns, and tolerating not-knowing—skills essential to clinical excellence.

Participants will leave with practical strategies for teaching poetry in medical education contexts, reframing ambiguity as a generative and necessary feature of clinical reasoning rather than a deficit to be eliminated. When ambiguity is embraced rather than feared, learners are better prepared for the realities of medical practice.

First in the Canadian Association for Health Humanities Rounds series