Week 5: Christina Lukban

Week 5

In this week's reading 'You Are Here': Locating 'Spirituality' on the Map of the Current Medical World by Parameshwaran Ramakrishnan, we discuss the theme of rethinking the Western Health Services through observing how certain healthcare professionals have been joining the chaplaincy program and investing time in obtaining a clinical pastoral education. With this, spiritual care and the integration of spirituality and medicine has been growing in the field of medicine in a positive way. In the anthropology class I am taking right now, we were discussing the influence of culture in a society and how science in itself is a culture; including medicine. There's no way to indicate if the way of science and medicine can affect the people's lives in the best way, that is just a big part of how the Western world's society thinks. Biomedicine in a hospital is all just a culture with a set of beliefs and regulations of what a society thinks is right, but it doesn't necessarily make it any better than spiritual care. As I am planning on working in the health care industry one day, I believe that in order to treat patients effectively, it’s important to look at who they are holistically beyond their injuries/diseases. A lot of the time, in order to heal patients, we must look and relate to them in a cultural and spiritual sense to really help them. Having health care professionals be more open-minded and spiritually competent, their presence in hospitals can effectively heal people by being more empathetic and compassionate of the patient and their experiences.

Question: Are there classes in Med School for future health professionals to learn to incorporate religion, culture, and spirituality in their work?