‘the ethical dimensions of patient care’ -- #42

With entries #42-#48, I want to share most recently revised draft of a Grand Rounds lecture on the subject of assessing patients’ spiritual wellbeing I was invited to deliver in August 2000 for the Obstetrics and Gynecology residents in the Phoenix area. I did not know personally any resident or faculty member in the Phoenix audience. In an attempt to justify why I had been asked to speak on this subject, I began by profiling my experience and training in four ways. First, I explained my three ‘weight-bearing’ positions (as distinguished from an ‘ethicist’ role) on the medical education/practice ‘field’ over the previous eight years – i.e., (1) as project coordinator and evaluator with an intervention project at the University of Miami for 125 cocaine-abusing women who had prematurely delivered cocaine-exposed babies, (2) as residency coordinator and ethics educator while on faculty with the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Louisiana State University in New Orleans, and (3) as a member of the executive leadership team for a non-profit community health center serving medically un(der)insured individuals and families in three poverty-ridden Appalachia counties of eastern Tennessee and Kentucky. Second, I referenced my participating as an adjunct faculty member with Michigan State University’s Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences in the development of a curriculum for addressing spirituality in medical education. I had corresponded for several years with Howard Brody, MD, PhD, at Michigan State as he attempted to keep his course in the medical school curriculum on ‘spirituality and the practice of medicine’ from collapsing into a ‘religion’ course. Third, I recalled my first wife’s fourteen-year struggle against her deterioration and eventual death due to multiple sclerosis. Fourth, I mentioned the impetus for clarifying my thought re ‘spirituality and medicine’ that came from preparing to participate in the creation of an educational video at Vanderbilt for hospital employees re assessing patients’ spiritual needs.