Buddhist center draws focus to patients' diverse beliefs

Physicians need to be sensitive to the faith-held beliefs of their patients, especially to how these precepts may influence a patient's understanding of illness.

By Vida Foubister, amednews staff. March 5, 2001.

Hinsdale, Ill. -- Now that the Chicago area is home to an estimated 150,000 Buddhists, health care professionals here must learn to recognize and respond appropriately to their spiritual needs.

"The interest in Buddhism and practices of Buddhism have become so widespread that Buddhism will eventually change the health care system," predicted Jan Chozen Bays, MD, a Zen teacher and pediatrician in Portland, Ore., at a conference held last month at the Buddhadharma Meditation Center in Hinsdale.

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But Buddhism is only one of several world religions gaining prominence in Chicago and across the United States that the Park Ridge Center, which sponsored the conference, plans to explore in its recently launched World Religions and Health Care initiative. Hinduism and Islam are two others.

The center has a long history of studying diversity among Christian and Jewish groups, and is simply "moving into the natural new diversity," explained research associate Paul D. Numrich, PhD.

One of the questions the center's scholars will be asking is, how do the beliefs and practices of these religions impact health care? In addition to research, the center also will work to educate people about this diversity and develop leaders who can bridge the gap between mainstream medicine and these different religious communities.

Dr. Numrich and others at the Park Ridge Center, which studies the intersection of faith, health and ethics, are among an increasing number of scholars inside and outside the medical profession who believe more attention should be paid to the diversity of patients' spiritual needs.

But this is not an easy task. Buddhists, like Christians, have many different forms of practice. In addition, many people have personal beliefs that fall outside of religion.

"Spirituality is whatever gives a person deep meaning in life," explained Christina Puchalski, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Many doctors who have begun to address the religious concerns of patients don't recognize that those concerns can vary significantly. Either they tend to have religiously homogenous patient populations or are simply responding to the popular resurgence of spirituality in American culture.

In both cases, doctors lack the religious training necessary to respond appropriately. But "they've begun to advocate that physicians generally should give attention to these concerns," said Larry VandeCreek, DMin, co-director of pastoral research at the HealthCare Chaplaincy in New York City. "All of this generally does not take account of the increasing religious diversity in our culture."

Experts in health care and religion tend to agree that physicians should make a distinction between recognizing that their patients have spiritual needs and becoming actively involved in providing for those needs.

The former can be achieved by gathering a patient's religious and spiritual history -- something that doesn't require physicians to have a working knowledge of multiple world religions.

"We're asking doctors to be sensitive, that there are cultural influences on how people interact with their health care providers and how people understand health and illness," said Dr. Puchalski, who teaches medical students and residents as well as practicing physicians about all of these issues.

The Buddhist case

The Rev. Nancy M. Waite, a chaplain at Evanston Hospital, presented a case at the Chicago conference that further illustrates the complexity of this new religious diversity. It involved the birth of a premature infant to a Thai woman who practiced Buddhism and her American husband who was Roman Catholic.

"Taped to the back of the baby's isolette was a picture of the Buddha in the lotus position, next to that was a cross with Jesus on it, and next to that was a prayer to Our Lady of Lourdes," Waite said.

After the mother shared her quest to obtain spiritual protection for her baby girl -- including a visit to a fortune teller and prayers to multiple deities -- with Waite, she asked her "to pray and directed me how to pray. ... People want compassionate care. That's the most important thing."

Though hospitals often have policies that allow them to respect the spiritual needs of Judeo-Christian patients, they need to be normalized for these new religious traditions.

Beth Burbank, DMin, acting chair of the Dept. of Religion, Health and Human Values at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, said that the death of a Buddhist patient from Taiwan raised this issue among the medical staff there.

The family's request that his body not be moved for eight hours so that they could pray for the transmigration of his soul first provoked anxiety. Not only was the hospital on bed alert, but state law doesn't allow dead bodies to remain on the floor for more than a couple of hours.

"How different is this from an Orthodox Jew who dies on the Sabbath?" she asked. "In this hospital, we've overruled the system to say this patient can't be moved.

"If we can do this with an Orthodox Jewish patient, we can do this with a Buddhist patient," she said.