This comic tells how a Chicago med school is using improv, virtual reality and, yes, comics to help doctors and patients communicate

A portion of Josh Neufeld’s “Empathy 101” comic showing Dr. Marshall H. Chin, a physician and professor who teaches health equity courses at UChicago Medicine. (Josh Neufeld)

In “Empathy 101,” comics journalist Josh Neufeld uses the comic book form to tell the real-life story of how the University of Chicago and other medical schools are using improv comedy, virtual reality and even comics to improve communication and understanding between doctors and patients.  

“Too often, patients perceive that clinicians have not listened to them or understood their values, views and preferences,” the comic quotes Dr. Marshall Chin, a UChicago Medicine physician and professor who teaches health equity courses, as saying.

Neufeld’s comic draws on a body of published academic research, newspaper articles and interviews with experts including Chin, Dr. Mohammadreza Hojat, a research professor at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia who developed the Jefferson Scale of Empathy to measure health care providers’ capacity to understand the feelings of others, and Kriota Willberg, a visual artist and clinical massage therapist who practices and teaches graphic medicine.  

The comic presented here discusses the growing field of graphic medicine, which uses comics as a tool to tell personal stories about health care experiences and to distill and discuss complex medical topics.

Neufeld sees comics as an ideal medium to tell this story, saying they allowed him to “engender a strong sense of empathy for the ‘characters’ in the story.”  

Comics journalist Josh Neufeld. (Provided)

Quotations from those experts — shown in shaded pink speech bubbles or pink rectangles — come directly from Neufeld’s interviews with them, from newspaper articles in which they were interviewed or from research papers they wrote.

Neufeld — whose own narrative is shown in light green — is the creator of several graphic medicine comics, including “Vaccinated at the Ball: A True Story about Trusted Messengers,” which won the National Association of Black Journalists’ NABJ Salute to Excellence Awards and the Graphic Medicine International Collective’s GMIC Award for Excellence in Graphic Medicine.

“Empathy 101” — republished here under a Creative Commons license — first appeared on The Journalist’s Resource, a project of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.