Part 2!

So today is about the patient and medical professional! I left off yesterday with a question about how the medical professional should go about bringing religion/faith into their everyday patient communication. Actually many medical schools require a medical student to take some sort of course revolved around “spiritual history.” It simply gives the student the means and education to assess how or whether or not they should invite religion into their communication with the patient. More recently, Medical Universities are offering “spirituality in medicine” classes. For example, University of Washington (Medicine) offers course for the purpose of providing an opportunity for interactive learning about relationships between spirituality, ethics and health care. Here are some of the goals of the class:

• To heighten student awareness of ways in which their own faith system provides resources for encounters with illness, suffering and death.
• To foster student understanding, respect and appreciation for the individuality and diversity of patients' beliefs, values, spirituality and culture regarding illness, its meaning, cause, treatment, and outcome.
• To strengthen students in their commitment to relationship-centered medicine that emphasizes care of the suffering person rather than attention simply to the pathophysiology of disease, and recognizes the physician as a dynamic component of that relationship.
• To facilitate students in recognizing the role of the hospital chaplain and the patient's clergy as partners in the health care team in providing care for the patient.
• To encourage students in developing and maintaining a program of physical, emotional and spiritual self-care which includes attention to the purpose and meaning of their lives and work.

The emphasis on listening to the patient and learning of the patient's beliefs and values as well as the signs and symptoms of illness is timely. Both play a critical part in the medical professional-patient relationship.

During my shadowing of Dr. Adams (Shelbyville, TN), I noticed a whole slew of various persons come through her office. Although they were treated individually, one of her nurse practitioners kept mentioning, “Same thing, just a different day. You would think by now I could do my job with my eyes closed.” This does nothing to convince me that the professionals are doing all they can to relate to the patient as a person, rather than just simply another problem to fix.  These are the types of problems our demand for speed causes.

A lot of simplistic problems work against the patient’s need, not all of them being avoidable. The office visit grows shorter as medical professionals are pushed into statistic of who better based on how many patients one sees. USA Today terms the physician as the "gatekeeper" in terms of referral to specialists, diagnostic procedures, or hospitalization decisions. This is all projected on the physician from an economy basis. However, an economy boost should not come at the sacrifice of respect for persons, the fundamental moral obligation in the profession of medicine.

From the patient point of view, these problems are only complicated by a slew of rising ethical questions concerning the medical field’s process of coming up with new technologies or medicine to help the patient. Not only is there a lack of communication in the office but there are a mass of medical journals being morally questioned. Without the patient being able to ask their own doctor about the conflict, what else can they do but look into the bias of the publicity world?

Glenn McGee touches on so many areas of the medical world that are being questioned with good reason. A great advancement such as Polyheme  is being squandered under the moral criticism of the company that created it. Seasonale helps the female body from experiencing what can be a very chronic issue with menstruation. Yet, both of the products are feared because of the media and the medical profession’s inability to communicate a code of moral obligation whether it be their own faith or their respect for the patients faith. McGee goes from clinical trials to genomic baby production, and I see one outlying case question: where are the morals being taken into consideration? For me, all that starts in the medical professional’s office. Talking about it helps, truth be told!