ver 15 years ago, a young medical student named Christina wrote a paper for an ethics course based on her observations of patients with acute arthritis. “I remember visiting with this older lady. She had trouble walking and I felt real sadness for her. I sat down and started talking to her and she began to speak about her life with such richness and depth. She was religious and she told me how her relationship with God had deepened with her illness. I remember thinking: you can’t just walk-in and see what someone looks like physically to decide if they’re healthy. In many ways, she was healthier than I was.”

Based on enthusiastic responses from her professors, the paper, “Integrating Spirituality into the Practice of Medicine,” would transform not only Christina’s career path, but also the way spirituality is addressed in medical schools across the United States.

Today, the student is now the teacher: Dr. Christina Puchalski is a professor at George Washington University’s medical school. She is also the Founder and Director of the innovative George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health (GWish), a center devoted to developing educational, clinical and research programs for physicians and healthcare professionals.

In 2005, through a partnership between the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Foundation, grants were given for courses that teach young doctors about integrating their thinking to encompass both head and heart. “It means learning to take a patient’s medical history and their spiritual history,” says Puchalski. “It also means they have to be willing to talk about how to handle suffering with their patients.”

This approach has been successful. In 1992, three of the nation’s medical schools taught a course on spirituality and health. Today, over 100 of the 141 accredited medical schools in the country teach a course on spirituality in health. “Since we started, there has been a real sea change,” says Puchalski. “We’re now expanding the program to an international level, including Canadian and European medical schools.”

It may seem paradoxical that in the 21st century, with all of our extraordinary medical technologies, many doctors steer clear of their patient’s spiritual lives, preferring to focus instead on their physical symptoms. However, this approach fails to address the complete person. Also, since technology and improved medicines are allowing us to live longer, the need for a spiritual component in healthcare is only going to increase. The longer we live, sometimes in a diminished capacity, the more crucial the spiritual component may become. “By and large patients are tired of being just pushed through an assembly line where their diseases are looked at and not anything else about them,” says Puchalski.

“In fact,” says Dr. Harold Koenig, co-director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University Medical Center, “the problem is not that the public needs to become aware of the connection between spirituality and health, they already are. It’s the healthcare professionals and those who teach them.”

The author of several definitive books in the field including Faith and Mental Health, Dr. Koenig and his team are devoted to the research of spirituality and health. “I started doing this work 20 years ago because when I talked to patients that I took care of they told me how important their faith was to their coping with their health. And no one was addressing that.”

But things have changed and Dr. Koenig says that the increased focus the research is getting in the United States, Europe and Australia is to be expected. “Healthcare professionals have a very clear approach: first comes research, then education/teaching, then they teach that to students who end up actually doing it,” says Koenig. “The most exciting thing is the attention this research is attracting. In the last five years, there is probably 10 times more research and articles going on in the mental health literature than there was 30 years ago.”

In Chicago, a Templeton-funded team of 22 scientists, psychologists and theologians is seeking to bridge the historical and cultural gaps that have long discouraged interdisciplinary research on questions of spirituality. The three-year project, devised and supervised by the University of Chicago’s Professor John Cacioppo, is entitled “Expanding Spiritual Knowledge through Science: Chicago Multidisciplinary Research Network for Neuroscientific, Population-Based Studies of Sociality, Spirituality and Health.”

In embarking on the project in 2005, Cacioppo says that he was well aware that he would most likely encounter resistance from elements of the scientific community. “There have been some who see anyone doing research on religion as regressing,” he says. “That means that, if we are going to study this, we need to pass the most rigorous tests.”

Aside from tackling specific research subjects involving how people’s religiosity may impact their health, the project is also designed to create a fluid network of top-notch scholars who can guide and inform each other’s work. Because of the novelty of the approach, the project’s organizers took great pains to foster a sense of common purpose among the scholars through a series of Chicago-area retreats before beginning research in earnest. “Results may be years in the offing but,” Cacioppo says, “just creating the framework for the network and winning Templeton’s support is a huge accomplishment.”

www.templeton.org/funding_areas/core_themes/spirituality_and_health/