Mindfulness may be viewed as a vehicle to promote the healer's role in medicine. This role addresses the way in which a medical practitioner interacts with patients. The aim of this article is to highlight how mindful qualities may also enhance teaching in clinical settings. Challenges to being a mindful clinical teacher are presented along with creative ways to accommodate them. Residents play...

Communication in the field of biogerontology is a minefield because all of the commonly used terms have no universally accepted definitions. In a series of five annual meetings that I chaired recently in an attempt to define common terms, the dozen or more experts who attended could not agree on the definition of almost all of them, including ‘‘aging.’’ The committee was disbanded and the commu...

Phenomenology and the phenomenological movement were founded by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the 20th century. Husserl’s command “to the things themselves” does not simply mean withdrawing from prejudices and from all traditional dogmas; rather, it is an invitation to become fully immersed in things. The phenomenological attitude tries to be as open as possible to t...

Karl Jaspers' theory on the incomprehensibility of psychotic disorders has become the reference point for many critical studies in the field of contemporary psychopathology. According to Jaspers, it is impossible to understand any of the serious mental disorders often referred to as 'psychosis' because of their unreasonableness, a truth that is revealed when one attempts to empathize with the m...