Why Doctors Should Start Taking Your Past Spiritual History

A little over a decade ago, Farr Curlin, a physician and professor of medical humanities at Duke Divinity School, became curious about the spiritual lives of his colleagues. He already knew that patients’ religious beliefs and communities matter: Both influence medical decisions and change the meaning of illness. But the influence of physicians’ religiosity on their work was relatively unknown.

So he and his colleagues conducted a of physicians’ religious characteristics. He found that, compared to a sample of the general U.S. population, physicians were twice as likely to bring up spiritual and religious matters with patients and their families, even though addressing these dimensions of illness can help coping with death, and even though .