Different health care reform: doctors trained to deal with patients about faith

A holistic approach

First, physician educators must pay attention to the way they and their colleagues act around spirituality and religion in their work. Too many debates about spirituality in medicine are focused on what physicians should do rather than what they are actually doing now.

While some are silent, others have developed ways of responding to or accommodating discussions of spirituality and religion that may be instructive. For example, we asked physicians whether prayer comes up in their work. All reported that it does, at least occasionally, usually when a patient or family member asks them to pray for them. 

The physicians described a range of ways they respond to these prayer requests. While a few do pray with patients, many more reframe such requests in ways that feel more comfortable to them. They might stand silently in support of patients while family members or chaplains offer prayers, for example, or speak at funerals rather than lead prayers, as some families have asked. 

Second, doctors should pay more attention both to people’s religious traditions and to their broader senses of spirituality and meaning. 

Given recent survey data showing how often people combine religion and spirituality, and how helpful either one or both can be, being sensitive to questions of spirituality and of religion is especially important. 

This means engaging with patients when they want to talk about their religious background or attending religious services and being open to broader conversations about spirituality and meaning. 

There are lots of different “spiritual tools” available for physicians. One example is a set of questions healthcare providers can ask patients to gather information from them about their religion or spiritual needs. Having questions on hand that address faith and belief and how medical professionals can address these issues in healthcare can help.

Third, it makes sense to systematically include hospital chaplains and nurses in educational initiatives. Two-thirds of American hospitals have chaplains, and nurses have a much longer tradition of talking with patients about spirituality and religion at the bedside than do physicians. Nurses also often spend more time with patients than do physicians.

Although physicians frequently spoke with us about Jehovah’s Witnesses and Orthodox Jews, it is important for them to remember that a broader range of people see spirituality and religion as important to their healthcare.

It seems that physicians often forget that religious and spiritual issues are important to people all the time, not just when chaplains are called in hospitals, which is often in end-of-life situations.

A holistic approach to taking care of people, one that will most help those who seek healing, means that more doctors will have to begin to understand patients’ complex relationships to spirituality and religion, rather than ignoring them. 

Wendy Cadge is associate professor of sociology at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. She is working on her second book, “Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine.”

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