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Latest News
II&M successfully attended the ISNA convention and had engaging discussions from the 1st to the 4th of September.
Announcing Final Cohort: 'Introduction to the Field of Islamic Bioethics' Course Starts in September! Enjoy 50% off using the 'BIOETHICS50' Code.
initiativemedicine

Religious Perspectives on the Clinical Encounter

MEDC 30030 / RETH 30030

Instructors: John D. Yoon, MD & Aasim I. Padela, MD, MSc

Course Description:

Medicine is a moral practice, and suffering, illness, and dying are among the most deeply challenging of all human experiences. It is not surprising then that religious and spiritual traditions inform the ways many patients and clinicians understand, navigate, cope with, and make decisions related to illness. These traditions are a significant source of personal identity for some clinicians and also serve as a moral framework through which groups of patients and providers address challenges in healthcare. A burgeoning literature on the religious characteristics of clinicians delineates how clinicians’ religious traditions and commitments can shape their clinical practices (Program on Medicine and Religion). Drawing from this literature and the primary course text, Hostility to Hospitality: Spirituality and Professional Socialization within Medicine (Michael Balboni, PhD & Tracy A.

Balboni, MD, Oxford University Press, 2018), this course will provoke learners to consider the religious and spiritual dimensions of the clinician-patient relationship, while covering broad concepts relevant to the intersection of the clinical encounter with religion (the Abrahamic traditions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism). Students will engage the course text’s primary argument that contemporary medicine with its secular-sacred divide is suffering from a form of collective spiritual sickness—namely, that depersonalizing, social forces through the market, technology, and legal-bureaucratic powers are reducing clinicians to tiny cogs in an unstoppable machine. This course will explore these hostilities threatening medicine and offer a path forward for the partnership of modern medicine and religion/spirituality. Guest speakers will also enrich the course by offering a personal perspective on the ways their religious traditions inform their approach to the clinical encounter.

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Mufti Nazim Khutbah

Padela Khutbah

Shkifah Khutbah

Intervention Study

Qualitative Study and Interviews

Fifty Muslim multiethnicity women (40 years old and above) were interviewed (6 focused group) and 19 in individual interviews. We found religious beliefs did informed mammography intention, which includes (1) the perceived religious duty to care for one’s health, (2) religious practices as methods of disease prevention, (3) fatalistic notions about health, and (4) comfort with gender concordant health care.

Quantitative Study and survey

240, 40 years of age or older, were surveyed (72 respondents were Arab, 71 South Asian, 59 African American, and 38 from another ethnicity). We found that positive religious coping and perceived religious discrimination in health settings significantly (negatively) affected mammogram adherence among Muslim women in Chicago.

American Cancer Society mammogram recommendations

Mammogram recommendation for women at average risk or breast cancer

  • Women between 40 and 44 have a choice to have a mammography every year.
  • Women 45 to 54 should get mammograms every year.
  • Women 55 and older can switch to a mammogram every other year, or they can choose to continue yearly mammograms.

3R model

Reframing “switch train tracks”
  • Keep the barriers belief intact but change the way one thinks about it so it is consonant with the desired health behavior
  • Normalizes the barrier belief
Reprioritize: “show them a better train”
  • Introduce a new belief and create higher valence for it than the barrier belief
  • Normalization of the barrier belief is optional
Reform: “breakdown the train carriage”
  • Negate the barrier belief by demonstrating its faults by appealing to authority structures

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