Spirituality and Religion Within the Culture of Medicine provides a comprehensive evaluation of the relationship between spirituality, religion, and medicine evaluating current empirical research and academic scholarship. ...
Mona Hanford is an end-of-life-care activist, teacher and writer. She chaired the conference “Journey of the Soul–Peace at Last,” which was held at the Washington National Cathedral. In this interview, she explains her work with the...
Last week, a New York Times op-ed, “Get Married, Get Healthy? Maybe Not,” called into question a large body of research indicating marriage is associated with better health, less depression, and greater well-being. From a rigorous research perspective, some of the earlier studies were indeed methodologically weak, but in the past two decades, that has changed. There are now a number of strong studies that reinforce and demonstrate that marriage—in addition to being a good in...
After MCLA, and following a year in China to teach English, Alexandra Nichipor ’12 went on to earn her master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School. She recently accepted a position at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she’s a research assistant for its Initiative on Health, Religion and Spirituality.
The Initiative’s mission, Nichipor explained, is to...
A DEVOUT 35-year-old Latina woman with two young children lies in the intensive-care unit (ICU) of a Boston-area hospital, dying from cancer. With no sign of improvement, the medical team advises withdrawing life support, but the woman’s husband refuses. The couple has been pushing for...
Dr. Christina Puchalski is familiar with death. The palliative care doctor and founder of the George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health (GWish) has seen countless patients facing the end of life ― but there are still moments that shake her foundation.
Several years ago, Puchalski went into a checkup with a patient previously diagnosed with a terminal illness. Puchalski knew the appointment might take a while, and she was already running behind schedule. She was nervous.
“I felt the anxiety as I walked in the room,” Puchalski told The Huffington Post. “...
The evolution of medicine away from individual patient-centered care and towards a more efficient, population-based approach has had large repercussions on the quality and depth of care delivered to the ill. As healthcare reforms in the United States continue to be made, the patient-physician relationship is being strained as the practice of medical care moves physicians away from seeing patients for more than their physical ailments. Dr. Abraham Nussbaum, director of adult inpatient psychiatry at Denver Health,...
Science of Connectedness is a new blog by Sarah Koss that explores spirituality and health through research and reflection.
Sarah Koss is a Summer 2016 research intern working with Drs. Michael and Tracy Balboni, with a primarily focus on the National Clergy Project. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in honors psychology and just completed the first year of her Master of...
Numerous media reports have been made on the findings from a recently published study in JAMA Internal Medicine by Drs. Shanshan Li, Meir Stampfer, David Williams, and Tyler VanderWeele entitled "Association of Religious Service Attendance with Mortality Among Women."
The study, conducted through The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, found that women who attended religious services more than once per week were 33% less likely to die during a 16-year-follow-up than...
Spiritual Dimensions of Illness and Healing: The 4th Annual Medicine and Religion Conference
by Daniel W. O’Neill MD, MATSc
The Fourth Annual Conference on Medicine and Religion was held in Cambridge, MA, USA March 6-8, 2015. In western culture, there continues to be a divide between care...
After MCLA, and following a year in China to teach English, Alexandra Nichipor ’12 went on to earn her master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School. She recently accepted a position at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she’s a research assistant for its Initiative on Health, Religion and Spirituality.
