As the current healthcare system sees ever-increasing crises in delivery of care, the voices calling for a more humanistic approach to treatment are growing nationwide. This article offers a perspective on our educational system, showing how true change toward more enlightened care needs to begin within our own curricula. The authors propose strategies for the addition of humanities into PT education—to form practitioners “who can skillfully balance both science and soul” in daily practice.

In October 1995, APTA celebrated its fourth Physical Therapy Month with the theme Physical Therapy: Hands-on Health Care. This article chronicles the journey of author Cathron Donaldson from that date, when she hesitated to share her experience as a physical therapist with a disabled hand, to the slightly more enlightened present. Her report concludes that “we must recognize that diversity in healthcare providers, especially disabled providers, directly benefits patient care.”

Dr. Carey L Holleran sees kindness as the “underlying ethos” that physical therapy curricula strive to cultivate in students. In this report, she describes a moment when she rendered this concept a profound reality with a group of students. She wrote a personal letter to them, sharing her deepest faith-based reflections on treatment, and read it aloud in class. She presents that letter here. “Lean in with unexpected kindness every chance you get,” it reads. “When we deliver unexpected or even what we might think is undeserved kindness, we are agents of our own change for the better.”

This insightful article describes the creation of a roleplaying workshop for residents of a Children’s Hospital for Mental Health in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The authors demonstrate how “the use of narrative roleplaying games in diverse contexts of care and rehabilitation” can foster ways for children to relate with each other “by sharing the pleasure of playing.”

“Communicating in the Silence” focuses on the challenges that deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) patients can face when seeking mental healthcare. Marcela Almeida and Katherine Kosman detail the barriers to care of one DHH young man, whose “medical diagnosis and treatment path were substantially changed by a more careful assessment that considered the unique aspects of the DHH population.” The authors’ recommendations for the future include an argument for greater use of Certified Deaf Interpreters in healthcare.