Medical Humanities; Study on the Challenges of Interdisciplinary Training in Medical Sciences in Iran

Medicine and related subjects are fundamental pillars of the development of modern humanities, as humanities have been able to provide a good basis for explaining health issues. The goal of this study was to explore the challenges facing medical humanities in Iran.

This exploratory research aimed to assess the challenges facing the development of medical humanities in Iran. This qualitative research used a triangulation method for data collection. The participants’ observations in one session for making disciplines in the Ministry of Health and 12 interdisciplinary science development discussions in the Southern Medical Education Region comprised the data of the present study. Based on Bourdieu and Foucault’s theories, data were analyzed using the directed qualitative content analysis method.

The study showed that the field of medical education is heavily dominated by the knowledge and power of biomedical discourse. This dominant, hegemonic, and non-homogeneous discourse takes the bulk of the field so that it does not communicate with other fields of knowledge. Nevertheless, marginal discourses also pursue a kind of resilience ethos and this resistance ethics has managed to fulfill part of its goals in the short term. The formation of medical humanities in the field of medical education depends on the resilience continuity of resistance morality in academic discourses.

The development of medical human medicine is one of the requirements of medical education in Iran, which is proposed to be pursued at the policy and intellectual levels.