An Interpretative Study Of Physicians’ Perception Of Spirituality With Special Reference To Its Neglect In Medical Care System

Abstract

Although spirituality as the fourth dimension of health has received a high significance in recent years, it has been scarcely addressed sociologically by social researchers. The purpose of this research conducted in an interpretative paradigm is to identify the prominent types of physicians’ perception of spirituality and the obstacles preventing spirituality from being integrated in Iran’s medical care system. The data has been collected by in-depth interviews with faculty members of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences including internists, psychiatrists, and cardiologists. Typology, thick description and thematic analysis are the methods through which data has been analyzed qualitatively. On the basis of the results, “religion-based spirituality”, “transcendental spirituality” and “horizontal spirituality”, are the three emergent types of spirituality perception among MDs. Regarding spirituality’s integration obstacles, five themes are considered as the most influential ones; “lack of a common spirituality-oriented discourse among medical care providers”, “a high population of patients referring to clinical centers putting medical care givers in a time-deficiency condition in respect to attention to spiritual matters”, “doubts about spirituality integration-related attempts as being a merely scientific project leading them to be supposed as politically guided actions managed by country’s formal political system taking aim at making anything religious including medicine”, “purely scientific positivist socialization of medical students through biomedicine teachings provided by medical schools”, and “physicians’ theoretical unfamiliarity with humanities due to structural segregation of medical sciences, at the ministerial level, as a separated branch of higher education in comparison to the other main body of Iran’s higher education containing all other fields of sciences”.