Hospital Caregivers' Own Religion in Relation to Their Perceptions of Psychosocial Inputs into Health and Healing

Abstract

The physicians, nurses, and several types of allied caregivers (N=1,237) in three, suburban-Chicago medical centers were surveyed as to their openness to psychosocial/mind-body inputs in health and healing. Ideal types of biomedicine and psychosocial medicine were initially contrasted. Psychosocial measures were constructed for holism, positive mindedness, social support, religious support, and patient equality. Holism turns out to be the broadest measure, and religious support the most unrelated and idiosyncratic. The caregivers generally are somewhat open to the psychosocial with the "mind" workers (psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and chaplains) the most favorable. Catholic and Protestant caregivers profess higher levels of religious practice, with three-fourths of the religious "Nones " disclaiming any practice and very little agreement with the psychosocial. The survey asked the caregivers' preference among Martin Marty's four religio-philosophical "expectations" for healing. Over 70% prefer sympathy (God suffers with humankind but does not guarantee miracle cures). The remainder are scattered among synergist (new age), monergist (miraculous), and autogenesist (humanistic) views. Throughout Western history, the institutions of religion and of health and healing have had a supportive but ambivalent relationship to each other. The ancient Hebrews had little formal medicine, yet the temple priests acted almost as public health officers for the community. Medicine as a differentiated occupation began in Greece and was tied to the cult of pagan, temple healing deities. In the New Testament, faith healing and secular medicine were not seen as contradictory. In the Western Middle Ages, many clergy had the "angelic connection" of functioning both as priests and as physicians (Numbers and Amundsen, 1986). The organizational secularization of medicine was slow and uneven. Up until the twentieth century, practitioners of medicine were divided into many parties, sects, and cults which based practice upon unproven ideas (Starr, 1982). Modern "scientific" medicine emerged in the nineteenth century but did not become institutionalized and dominant in the United States until the early twentieth. The present research investigates the extent to which contemporary hospitalbased caregivers are conscious of any connections between the healing process and the patient's mental outlook and social relations (here termed the "psychosocial"), as well as between healing and spirituality and religion. To what extent are modern hospital caregivers open to complementing their practice of "biomedicine" - the name commonly given to the leading paradigm of modern medical practice - with elements of psychosocial/mind-body medicine, which