Title: What has religion to do with the practice of medicine?
 

Although a series of patient-centered movements have brought attention to the influence of culture and religion on patients’ experiences of illness, medicine has tended to think of clinicians as more or less interchangeable representatives of one biomedical profession, trained to set aside the undue influence of their “personal values.” In this talk, Farr Curlin will describe a series of studies that chart the influence of physicians’ religious characteristics on their clinical practices. These studies, it turns out, find that physicians in the US are more or less as religious as their patients, and physicians’ religious faith matters both for their concrete practices and for how they understand their goals and responsibilities as physicians. Dr. Curlin will then provide a framework to make sense of these connections between faith and clinical practice, and to suggest that we should not be surprised to find that medicine and religion are so intertwined. Finally, in light of these connections, he will consider what the profession of medicine might hope for from renewing and deepening its engagement with religious traditions and practices.

Participants in this session will be able to:

• Describe how physicians’ religious characteristics are associated with their practices in a range of clinical domains.
• Outline a basic framework to make sense of the connections between religious faith and the practice of medicine.
• Describe ways the profession of medicine might more fully engage religious traditions and practices as resources for understanding and practicing good medicine.

Farr A. Curlin, MD, is Josiah C. Trent Professor of Medical Humanities in the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and History of Medicine; Co-Director of the Theology, Medicine and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School; and Director of the Arete Initiative in Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. Before moving to Duke in 2014, he founded and was Co-Director of the Program on Medicine and Religion at the University of Chicago. At Duke, Dr. Curlin practices hospice and palliative medicine, and he works with colleagues across the university to develop opportunities for education and scholarship at the intersection of theology, medicine and culture. He has authored more than one hundred and thirty articles and book chapters dealing with the moral and spiritual dimensions of medical practice. Dr. Curlin’s work focuses on the relevance of religious ideas and practices for the doctor-patient relationship, the moral and professional formation of clinicians, and care for patients at the end of life.

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A light lunch will be provided on a first come, first served basis.

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TRANSCRIPT
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