Spirituality/Medicine Interface Project
Ministering to Patient and Person
Abstract
As we have been frequently reminded, the spiritual and the medical were once joined in the same figure. Since the days of the Enlightenment, however, the trend has been to encourage a divide between the arts that minister to the body and those that minister to the soul. In so doing, medicine largely has gone the way of the scientific, placing its confidence in objective, evidence-based procedures and an ever-growing multitude of tests, cultures and scans. By contrast, spiritual and pastoral care, guided by emotive signs rather than electronic or biochemical signals, became increasingly "humanistic," looking for the person before the patient. Both medicine and spiritual care have benefited from this separation. However, much like a pair of rival siblings, while a certain degree of distance may be beneficial, complete estrangement is an immature denial of a common heritage, which, in the long run, may prove to be detrimental: both have something to learn from understanding the other"s perspective.This content is limited to qualifying members.
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