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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Elizabeth A. Catlin, MD, Pediatric Service, Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit St., Boston, MA 02114, 617-724-4387, ecatlin@partners.org and Wendy Cadge, PhD, Health Policy, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research, Harvard School of Public Health, Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02116.

Medical practice based on the biomedical model is evolving as research and experience highlight that patients want healthcare providers to be conversant about alternative and complementary medicine, including spirituality and religious beliefs. The primary focus of current research in this area, relative to faith tradition and spirituality, has been on patients rather than staff. Very little existing research provides insights into how religious thinking and spirituality influences physicians' practice of medicine, choice of career, understanding of vocation, and impact on ethical decision-making. We undertook an in-depth interview project with thirty senior academic physicians at a major Harvard teaching hospital. Our central hypothesis was that clinicians either secularize their work over the course of their careers or undergo a spiritual transformation facilitating deeper engagement with both religious traditions and relationships with their patients. The information gathered has been analyzed inductively using a grounded theory approach. Themes emerging from these data reveal fascinating and previously unpublished insights into constructions of reality physicians form about their medical practices. The personal beliefs they incorporate into medical practice range from those with clear conviction that medical practice is ministry and patient care is doing “God's work” to individuals who view their practice of medicine as a series of modern scientific applications made possible by human ingenuity. The majority of respondents fall between these two extremes, necessitating new ways of thinking about how religion influences medical practice through the experiences and understandings of physicians.

Learning Objectives:

• Participants will understand the unique ways that the medical practice and patient care of senior academic physicians are informed by specific spiritual and religious beliefs.

Keywords: Religion, Alternative Medicine/Therapies

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation