Surveys suggest that most patients have a spiritual life and regard their spiritual health and physical health as equally important. Furthermore, people may have greater spiritual needs during illness. We reviewed published studies, meta-analyses, systematic reviews, and subject reviews that examined the association between religious involvement and spirituality and physical health, mental heal...

Attitudes towards active voluntary euthanasia (AVE) and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) among 1,238 doctors on the medical register of New South Wales varied significantly with self-identified religious affiliation. More doctors without formal religious affiliation ('non-theists') were sympathetic to AVE, and acknowledged that they had practised AVE, than were doctors who gave any religious af...

In the last decade, a number of studies have shown the success of spiritual medicine. These studies come from a wide number of fields and deal with many aspects of religious and spiritual practice. A recent study by Koenig et al (1999), looking at a population of nearly four thousand 65 year-old people over a six-year period, was able to show that those who go to church at least once a week are...

The art of healing knows no distinction between religion and medicine. They are warp and woof of the same fabric, each supporting the other. The ancients viewed the weave as a whole; we stain for medicine, and, under high magnification, see little of its interlacing pattern with religion. Today we talk about religion and medicine. This word and has been the key term in a mushrooming field of ar...

Religious people nowadays have more children on average than their secular counterparts. This paper uses a simple model to explore the evolutionary implications of this difference. It assumes that fertility is determined entirely by culture, whereas subjective predisposition towards religion is influenced by genetic endowment. People who carry a certain 'religiosity' gene are more likely than a...

That my approach to institutional theory has garnered most interest from students in business schools is ironic in that it derives from sources that hard-headed management theory would likely consider ridiculous. To put it baldly it derives from a double messianism, two unobservable subjects to come: the proletariat and God’s messenger. My initial preoccupation with the institutional level of a...

BACKGROUND AND AIM The sex of the physician performing the endoscopic procedure is one of the parameters influencing patient satisfaction. Our aim was to characterize patients' preferences according to their sex, socioeconomic status, and religious beliefs and according to procedure-related variables. METHODS All patients undergoing an endoscopic procedure at Sheba Hospital between April 2012...

The problem of respecting the patients' religious-based decisions seems to play increasingly important role in medical practice. Most probably it happens because: (i) bioethical standards accentuate the principle of the respect for autonomy (the departure form medical paternalism) and (ii) the contacts between people belonging to different religious traditions are becoming more and more frequen...

Religious beliefs play an important role in the study of religious practices and behaviour. Wulff (1997) suggested that there are four basic attitudes towards religion: Literal Affirmation, Literal Disaffirmation, Reductive Interpretation and Restorative Interpretation. Building on this work, Duriez, Soenans and Hutsebaut (2005) constructed the Post-Critical Belief Scale (PCBS). In their work, ...