Physician Religion
The first expression of religion I’ve seen from an attending happened more than 9 months into my first clinical year:
A very, very sick pre-teen that we made sicker with chemotherapy wasn’t initially improving when he should have been, and the oncologist told us that she hasn’t slept in days, worrying about the child’s health. After another sleepless night, she told us that she
“Sat down and just prayed. Just prayed that [the child] would be okay, and that his counts would come back. I figured it couldn’t hurt. And then my daughter came into the room, and asked me what I was doing. And I said, ‘I’m praying for a little sick child who needs to get better,’ and my daughter decided to pray with me. And then my other daughter walked in, not saying a word, and sat down, bowing her head as well. After about a minute, she whispered, ‘What are we doing?’”
The attending on staff said that he knows an Indian adult oncologist who can get 1,500 people praying for a patient back in her hometown at a phonecall’s notice.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess. Kate and Matthew discuss a Forbes article noting that doctors are more religious than the general public, at least according to the survey. I think it’s easy in medicine to lose faith in God or religion day-to-day; you see terrible tragedies walk into your office or hospital on a regular basis. But I think there’s probably a part of many physicians that at least hopes there’s something more to all of this, something out of our control. It’s not something that we can rely on–but at least something that we can try to call upon when our medicines simply aren’t enough, or when we could really use the scale to tip in the right direction.
One of the many reasons medicine’s an art, not a science.
Beautiful post. Thank you.
Or maybe it’s because studying the human body inspires faith. I’m agnostic, but sometimes med school really makes me wonder about that gook that decided to walk out of the ocean. The human body is beautiful and amazing.
On a related note, have you ever thought about our view on mitochondria? That one bug really decided to get permanently embedded in another? Sometimes I seriously wonder about the stuff they tell us…
I dunno,
There are religious people everywhere, at least here in the states. Common conditions correlate with everything, so I suppose it’s hard to geralize here.
Good post, though. Keep up the good work.
Flea
My wife is a retired anesthesiologist having spent 27 years on the faculty of OHSU(that is OR not Ohio). One of the things that we had in common, besides being classmates, was our common Christian faith. We were both active in our respective churches then, and since our marriage, over 47 years ago we have continued to be active in our church. We have made five trips to a mission hospital in Kenya, and she went on a mission trip to Jamaica a few months before our first trip to Kenya. These trips were made because of our faith.
There are physicians who have religious faith but based on our experience I would question whether the percentage of physicians with religious faith is greater than the general population.
Can we honestly think of modern medicine as ‘science’? We study everything in large numbers, looking for trends or significance statistically, but does that ever correlate with the one-to-one practice of medicine?
I have my doubts and so do a lot of people who face reality, tragic,triumphant or mundane in their daily practice of medicine.
I am a blood banker and we of the lab bent see things from a ’round the corner’ perspective. About half of my colleagues believe in prayer and half are complete sceptics…