Should doctors ask about their patients' religious or spiritual beliefs?

The Culture, Narrative, and Medicine course at Loyola University of Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine teaches cultural humility through literature and students' reflective writing.

Despite the possible conflict between evidence-based and cultural competence approaches to medical care, both embody the ideals of medical ethics.

Despite the possible conflict between evidence-based and cultural competence approaches to medical care, both embody the ideals of medical ethics.

Suggests to medical students what forms of self-disclosure are acceptable during clinical encounters and when self-disclosure might be interpreted by patients as taking attention away from them.

Suggests to medical students what forms of self-disclosure are acceptable during clinical encounters and when self-disclosure might be interpreted by patients as taking attention away from them.

A review of research that found that physicians disciplined by state medical boards were as much as three times more likely than controls to have had a record of unprofessional behavior in medical school.

The clinician/healer must both address the disease and seek to know how the medical condition is being experienced by the patient—what impact it has on his or her life and spirit.

A look through the eyes of an emergency room physician in Baghdad at a 5-year-old boy who died for his grandfather’s religious beliefs.

The range of opinions on the extent to which physicians should attend to their patients’ spiritual lives and the arguments that support those opinions.