Film by NPC members explores religion’s role in good health

Religious beliefs and practices are good for your health, Dr. Harold Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University, asserts at the beginning of "Your Health: A Sacred Matter."

The film, by National Press Club members and father/son team Gerald and Adam Krell, previewed at a Club event May 23.

“Your Health: A Sacred Matter” cites studies showing the positive relationship between religion and well-being and examines the controversy over whether the appropriate place for religion and spirituality remains with the clergy and not in the doctor’s office.

It also explores the experiences of patients, family members, doctors and chaplains from a wide variety of religious backgrounds.

Adam Krell, producer and director of photography, said the challenge of making the film was that “we had to represent a lot of faith communities. We tried to do justice to people’s stories.”

Krell, his father and three of the experts who appeared in the film took part in a panel discussion following the screening. The discussion was moderated by Alison Kodjak, NPR's health policy correspondent and chair of the NPC Board of Governors.

Dr. Christina Puchalski, director of the George Washington Institute for Spirituality & Health, said she met with a lot of skepticism when she founded the institute in the early 1990s. Today, she notes, George Washington medical students are required to take a class that “helps them reflect on their calling, their vocation, the reason they are in medicine.”

“Everyone has a spirituality that can be expressed in different ways,” through music, touch, and love, Puchalski said. “Physicians have a license to touch; they have a touch and also a presence. They need to learn to recognize when to listen, when to connect. There needs to be time for the patient to have that deep listening space. They need to learn to create that space.”

Dr. Daniel Sulmasy, senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, said that students and residents raised on “a diet of pure science” are sometimes uncomfortable talking about spirituality.

But as these young people encounter the pain of their patients, “it break the ice and they begin to talk about it,” he said.

“Physicians need to grow in humility, to recognize limits of medicine.

Medicine doesn’t have tools to answer it itself,” Sulmasy said.

Without discussions of religion and spirituality, caregivers may never get to what’s really troubling a patient, he said, citing cases of “patients with HIV who were not taking their medicine because they felt God was punishing them, that they deserved to be sick.”

Addressing spirituality helps not only patients, but caregivers as well, the panelists noted.

“I come from a tradition of meditation that gives me a sense of inner peace,” said Dr. Siva Subramanian, chief of neonatal-perinatal medicine at Medstar Georgetown University Hospital.

Sulmasy said that “there are a lot of wounded healers in hospitals. They went in with the right attitudes” but are overwhelmed by the bureaucracy as well as the suffering.