Religion is the "unmovable foundation" on which Dr. James Keany bases his practice of medicine. He sometimes stops and prays with a patient coping with tragedy or life-changing illness, and he prays silently for many more.
"Patients are more than just an accumulation of lab tests and data. They are a living, breathing, feeling, spiritual entity," the Mission Viejo doctor said.
Praying with his patients doesn't cure their illnesses, he added, but it helps comfort them in a difficult time.
As an emergency medicine doctor at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center, Keany considers the spiritual health of his patients an important part of his job, like tending to their physical and emotional well-being.
Keany, a nondenominational Christian, may be more like his fellow doctors than previously assumed.
A new study has found that more than three-fourths of physicians believe in God and more than half believe in an afterlife. The survey of 1,144 physicians, published in the July issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, came as a surprise to the study's main author.
"Doctors are not as irreligious as we might have expected," said Dr. Farr Curlin, an instructor in the department of medicine at the University of Chicago.
More than half of the doctors said that their religious beliefs influenced their practice of medicine.
Doctors are often able to better care for their patients when they draw upon their religious beliefs, Curlin said. But not all doctors agree.
"A physician's religion is utterly irrelevant to the patient," said Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral science at Columbia University Medical Center, who has researched the topic of faith and medicine and advocates that they should not mix. "There are some elements of our lives that may be associated with health and illness that are nonetheless out of bounds for physicians."
Sloan noted that doctors hold considerable power in the clinical relationship. Because physicians know patients' private matters, see them naked and examine them in extremely personal ways, patients are in many ways vulnerable when visiting a doctor.
That vulnerability, Sloan cautioned, means doctors should be extra vigilant about mixing religious beliefs with their practice.
"There is a tremendous potential for abuse," he said.
Many previous studies have shown the importance of patients' faith to their health, well-being and medical decision-making. There has been comparatively little research on doctors' religious beliefs, however.
