Religious Values in Clinical Practice are Here to Stay

Abstract

Research to date has shown that health professionals often practice according to personal values, including values based on faith, and that these values impact medicine in multiple ways. While some influence of personal values are inevitable, awareness of values is important so as to sustain beneficial practice without conflicting with the values of the patient. Detecting when own personal values, whether based on a theistic or atheistic worldview, are at work, is a daily challenge in clinical practice. Simultaneously ethical guidelines of tone-setting medical associations like American Medical Association, the British General Medical Council and Australian Medical Association have been updated to encompass physicians' right to practice medicine in accord with deeply held beliefs. Framed by this context, we discuss the concept of value-neutrality and value-based medical practice of physicians from both a cultural and ethical perspective, and reach the conclusion that the concept of a completely value-neutral physician, free from influence of personal values and filtering out value-laden information when talking to patients, is simply an unrealistic ideal in light of existing evidence. Still we have no reason to suspect that personal values, whether religious, spiritual, atheistic or agnostic, should hinder physicians from delivering professional and patient-centered care. Keywords Religion Á Value-neutrality Á Clinical practice Á Physicians Á Medical ethics ''God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.'' So wrote Nietzsche in 1882 referring to the God of Christian tradition. Yet religiosity is thriving, and the number of people affiliated with a religion is estimated to increase by 2.3 billion by the year 2060 to a total of 8.4 billion religious individuals on the planet, an increase of 3.5 percent points relative to the total population (Pew Research Center (2017) The Changing Global Religious Landscape).

Religious values of physicians affect their clinical practice

“…[34] Research points toward an increase in the number of people affiliated with organized religion in the future, also when taking overall population increase into account. [35] We postulate elsewhere that the influence of religious values in clinical practice is here to stay, [36] and with the current study further proposes that the size of this influence, in a global perspective, has a weight that significantly alters patients’ health outcomes, and therefore merits due attention. We believe that education regimes of current and future physicians should encompass this knowledge, and help physicians learn how and when these values support professional and patient-centered care, and when they do not.…”

Approaching the religious psychiatric patient in a secular country: Does “subalternalizing” religious patients mean they do not exist?

“…It is now generally acknowledged that a “neutral” position is untenable in the recognition that the individual is always speaking from some position and that this cannot be a neutral position (Greenberg 2001; Nissen, Gildberg, & Hvidt, 2018). Likewise, recent research is asking whether (value) neutrality is even desirable (Kørup et al, 2018). The data support this position.…”

Human Values and Religion: Evidence from the European Social Survey

“…Religion is constituted as a cultural, social, and historical phenomenon, developing from the experiences of life in community. Accordingly, religious beliefs and customs markedly influence the formation of moral, social, and even political and economic value systems (Kørup et al 2020;Santos et al 2012). Theoretically, values and religion are understood to be considerably related in various ways (Chan et al 2020;Ives and Kidwell 2019;Musek 2017), in different cultural and religious groups (Saroglou et al 2004).…”