\u201cWhen people think of spirituality in medicine, the first thing that comes to mind is attending to the patient\u2019s needs,\u201d says Gowri Anandarajah, professor of family medicine at Brown\u2019s Warren Alpert Medical School and a 1988 graduate of Dartmouth's medical school. That\u2019s a good thing, she agrees. But Anandarajah has come to believe that spirituality\u2014which she defines broadly as a common human experience relating to meaning, purpose, values, and beliefs\u2014is important in physicians\u2019 lives, too. And for many, doctoring is itself a spiritual practice.<\/p>\n
As a resident at Duke University Medical Center in the late 1980s, Anandarajah found that her patients frequently talked about God and religion. Despite being a person of faith (Hindu), she didn\u2019t know how to respond to their comments; and her fellow physicians didn\u2019t seem to either. So she began to study spirituality in medicine.<\/p>\n
Over the years, Anandarajah developed curricula for medical students and residents to help them communicate with patients about spirituality, especially in cross-cultural contexts, and published multiple frameworks to guide physicians in providing whole-person care\u2014care that recognizes the mind, body, and spirit as important to health.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no longer unusual for medical students and residents to learn about spirituality as it relates to their patients\u2019 health, says Anandarajah. But it is still unusual for medical students, residents, and practicing physicians to talk about their own spiritual health.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is another hugely important aspect that has to do with why is a doctor a doctor,\u201d says Anandarajah, who is director of faculty development and co-director of the global health fellowship in Brown\u2019s Family Medicine Department. She is also associate medical director at Home and Hospice Care of Rhode Island. Medical students are so idealistic and service oriented when they enter medical school, she observes. \u201cMy question is how do you keep that passion, that spiritual fire alive in people as they go through their career?\u201d<\/p>\n
Anandarajah and a colleague recently concluded a small qualitative study of physicians\u2019 views on compassionate patient care and spirituality, to be published in the Rhode Island Medical Journal.<\/em> She was surprised to discover that most of the physicians linked compassion to underlying spiritual values, secular or religious.<\/p>\n \u201cTaking care of patients in a compassionate way, and finding it within themselves to do that, was in and of itself a spiritual practice for them,\u201d says Anandarajah, who is eager to explore this finding in future studies.<\/p>\n In her own career, Ananandarajah has found her fulfilment in caring for the medically underserved\u2014whether in Rhode Island, Central America, or India\u2014and in teaching medical students and residents. \u201cI do this work because I believe it\u2019s the right thing to do,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s part of my own spiritual belief system.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gowri Anandarajah, a member of the Class of 1988 and a professor of family medicine at Brown, has studied the place of spirituality in medicine\u2014for both patients and physicians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":2768,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[17,197,325],"class_list":["post-2766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-news","tag-alumni-2","tag-compassionate-care","tag-gowri-anandarajah","author-13"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2014\/07\/anandarajah-featured.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4r3h1-IC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2766"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2783,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2766\/revisions\/2783"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}