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341 20 Religion, Spirituality, Health, and Medicine Sociological Intersections Wendy Cadge, Brandeis University Brian Fair, Brandeis University practices including prayer can help with medical treatments, and close to 25 percent say they have been cured of an illness through prayer or another religious/spiritual practice.1 In a recent study, 60 percent of the public and 20 percent of medical professionals said they think it possible for an individual in a persistent vegetative state to be saved by a miracle (Jacobs, Burns, and Jacobs 2008). Just over 60 percent of Americans say they want physicians to ask about their spiritual histories if they become ill, and two-thirds of hospitals have chaplains (Cadge, Freese, and Christakis 2008).2 Prayer chains on the Internet connect people with a wide range of medical conditions, and religious groups regularly hold services for health and healing in small towns and large cities across the United States (Barnes and Sered 2005). These examples point to intersections among religion, spirituality, health, and medicine that are further evident in conversations taking place in newspapers, magazines, books, and scholarly journals. Some of this conversation is about religion , spirituality, and medical care, like whether pharmacists are obliged to dispense birth control when it conflicts with their personal religious values, or how medical teams should respond to families who are waiting for a miracle for a loved one the health-care team believes is terminal. Other pieces focus on the human condition more broadly through ethical questions about genetic When Michelle Bird, a white woman in her early forties, developed a rare form of cancer several years ago, she sought treatment at the DanaFarber Cancer Institute in Boston. There she was cared for by Dr. George Demetri, an expert in the field. In addition to standard biomedical treatments , Michelle, a Catholic, received reiki and acupuncture at Dana-Farber and attended services and readings in the small interfaith chapel there. She met monthly with a priest to receive his blessings and carried books like Jerome Groopman’s The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness with her to medical appointments. She described talking daily with God as a way of keeping up her strength and spirits: “I pray for strength, faith, and a cure, and I know that God is listening. . . . I’ve always believed in an afterlife, but I feel I’ve grown spiritually as a result of my cancer experience. . . . Without my faith, I don’t think I would be making it through this” (Wisnia 2004, 15). Michelle and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are not alone in thinking about the relationships between religion, spirituality, health, and medical care in the United States. Many of the nation’s first hospitals were founded by religious organizations, and religion/spirituality has long been a source of support for people when they are ill. National surveys report that 80 percent of Americans think personal religious/spiritual 342 Handbook of Medical Sociology technologies, assisted reproduction, euthanasia, medical decision making, and especially the social processes of birth and death. Medical and religious professionals, journalists, and members of the public contribute distinctive voices to these conversations, tapping into core questions about what it means to be human, and how we as a collective value life and make difficult decisions about birth and death in the process. Sociologists have been involved in discussions about religion, spirituality, health, and medicine more from the periphery than from the center of academic and public debates. Handbooks of medical sociology rarely include chapters about religion, and handbooks in the sociology of religion have only recently started to include chapters on health. While Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and other early sociologists inquired about the role of religion in the development of modern societies, their narratives of secularization combined with the secularization of the academy partly explain these silences. The compartmentalization of topics within sociology as a discipline is also responsible, as questions at the intersections between religion/spirituality and health/medicine were left on the fringes of two subfields and failed to develop into a robust sociological literature. Outside a relatively narrow set of questions about whether religion/spirituality influences the health of individuals and a broader set of bioethical concerns, sociologists have paid little sustained attention to the intersections between religion/spirituality and health/medicine in the lives of individuals or institutions (Fox and Swazey 2008). This chapter responds to these silences by identifying central sociological questions about religion, spirituality, health, and medicine, summarizing...

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