Your faith and your practice

Your faith and your practice
Excerpt from "Setting faith aside can make doctors less effective, researchers find," Press Herald. April 7, 2012--Doctors and scholars examine how physicians are discouraged or encouraged from integrating their faith and their practice. As a medical student, Dr. Julie Oyler was told to remove the cross she wore on the lapel of her white coat. As a resident, Dr. Aasim Padela was told he wouldn't have time to recite Islam's five daily prayers. But ignoring God was not an option for Oyler, an evangelical Christian, and Padela, a Muslim. Nor should it be, according to researchers at the University of Chicago, where both doctors now freely practice their medical specialties and religious traditions. After discovering that silence on matters of spirituality left some patients unsatisfied with the care they received at the University of Chicago, two doctors there and four faculty scholars have chosen to examine how some medical schools either encourage or discourage physicians to integrate their faith both in conversations with patients and their own professional lives. Doctors who set their faith aside, they say, can become disillusioned and less effective. "When doctors are dispirited, the care they give to patients is worse," said Dr. Farr Curlin, co-director of the Program on Medicine and Religion. "Patients should be very hopeful that their doctor sees their work as a remarkable privilege, even a holy privilege, that will make the doctor respond to that patient out of joy." Both Curlin and Dr. Daniel Sulmasy, an internist who also serves on the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, said they believe that as the gap between health care and religion has widened, the quality of care for patients has diminished.

Both men say policymakers and insurers have perpetuated that sense of alienation by treating healthcare as nothing more than a business. That has led some doctors to feel unfulfilled. Many seem to have forgotten the calling that led them to medicine, having been urged to abandon that way of thinking and focus on science, Sulmasy said. For many, that repression of faith begins in basic training when medical students are typically pressured to set their lifelong beliefs aside and focus on objective science. Oyler, a primary care physician at the University of Chicago, said she felt uncomfortable sharing her faith for years after she was reprimanded as a medical student for wearing a cross on the collar of her white coat. While she still doesn't advertise her evangelical Christian faith to patients, she does establish during the initial appointment what role religion plays in her patients' lives, in case that becomes the basis for decisions they make over time. If the person shares her Christian faith, she lets them know they have something in common.

Though the American Medical Association has no policy encouraging or discouraging a separation of church and medicine, the Joint Commission, the accrediting agency for health care institutions, requires medical professionals to receive some training in spiritual care. Still, there are some who believe God talk should be taboo in medicine and religion should play no role in a doctor's bedside manner. Full story can be found here.

CMDA Past President Al Weir, MD: "What role should faith play in our work as Christian doctors? Should it be visible? Should it be shared?

"Dr. Farr Curlin in Chicago and others, like Dr. Tracy Balboni in Boston, have addressed this issue with scientific methodology for many years. Their investigations clearly point to the conclusion that most patients wish for doctors to be open with their faith and to address spiritual issues. In 2005, Dr. Curlin summarized his recommendations for doctors in a beautiful article entitled Strangers or Friends (J Gen Int Med 2005; 20:370-374). He proposed that patients desire a doctor’s wisdom, not competence alone; patients desire respect for their faith issues, not avoidance; and patients desire candor rather than neutrality. Our patients want us to be authentic, especially if we are demonstrating the life God has called us to live.

"And they should. Our faith in Christ is a chisel that fashions us into better doctors. Faith in Christ shapes our character into integrity; knowing Him shapes our motivation into love; His truth defines all patients as persons of value; His presence brings wisdom into whole person care. For the good of our patients, Christians need to be authentic. This alone is enough to keep me on my knees every day.

"In addition, we have a mandate from the Creator of the Universe to share our faith, to bear witness. How we do that is another great story."

CMDA Ethics Statement: Sharing Faith in Practice
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