What if patients had a “do-it-yourself” method for developing spiritually that could also help manage chronic disease?
It sounds like a good idea, but how realistic is it?
Jeanne McCauley, MD and her research team from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine have found a cost-effective way for older adults suffering from chronic diseases to improve their energy levels through a “do-it-yourself” method of spiritual coping.
To test if the intervention was effective, Dr. McCauley randomly assigned 100 elderly, chronically ill patients to either a spiritual or educational (standard cardiac risk reduction) intervention. Each group watched a short video and then was given intervention-specific workbooks to complete over 4 weeks.
At the end of the intervention, the spirituality group had significantly higher energy levels compared to the pre-intervention test. However, energy levels significantly decreased for the education group.
What this means for our work is that the positive effects of spiritual development can go beyond the patient-clinician interaction and extend into patients’ lives, making the transformation work we do more thorough and sustainable.
This research also tells us that without any additional clinician time, we could start to see improvement in our patients.
There’s great potential to working with the spiritual side of our clients, even when treating physical conditions.
You can find the entire study in the International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine.
Do you give your patients spiritual exercises or homework at the end of a session? Please leave a comment below.
The book for which I am seeking a puhelsbir is called Living Truthfully. The Spiritual Journey is an e-book I compiled from posts on my blog and make available as a free download for people who subscribe to receive my posts in their Inbox. Hope that clears things up!
Thanks. Good idea and no doubt nearly any “spiritual” intervention will help many patients.
Nevertheless, effectiveness may not be the most significant issue here. In large managed care or corporate practices a guiding principle is “First, offend nobody.” Some patients will be unpredictably offended by spiritual suggestions or at least be suspicious of them, so offering such direct intervention may be problematic. Even here, one can take a step by suggestions like, “I am sure you can find ability and wisdom to HELP overcome [x,y,z] within yourself,” “Physical care is just one aspect of overall healing,” “Other resources can help you,” or something similar. Keep in mind, though, if we keep adding “hey, here’s another quick intervention to do, which will only take a few seconds” to a 10 or 15 minute appointment, we won’t have much time to directly address the patient’s primary reason for visiting.
If anyone has any suggestions for suggesting the blessings of spiritual interventions for our patients in such an environment, please pass them along. Thanks.
I have no idea how people survive these times without some sort of spiritual connection/sense/idea/belief. We are in such unsettled and unsettling times that to be without some sort of anchor/base/hope/comfort is, in my opinion, like drifting in the ocean on a sail boat without sails. Frightening!
Many, many years ago I was fortunate to have met up with people like Ram Dass, Steven Levine and others of like mind. Fortunately, I began to follow their paths. Ram Dass, who as most people know has had a stroke. He says he was “stroked,” and then wrote a book called I’m Still Here. He is my inspiration and I pass his books, tapes, life stories and anything else I can along to my clients with the hope that they too will learn to live gently, with grace even in difficult times.
New science at the systems level (Ervin Laszlo) and the new spirituality of Dr. David R. Hawkins both define us as spiritual beings having a human experience. Both also tell us that we are very well connected to an infinite memory of what has happened in this universe and to it’s creator. We can never be alone and anything that helps us understand who we really are will allow us to de-stress and likely get better (the extent may depend on the level of understanding of who we really are and our ability to let go of stressful habits and beliefs).
Most religions have forgotten their reasons for being (bureaucrats in all businesses and fields of information are uninterested in the reasons for the organization coming into being and change the organization to suit their need for power) so religions do not do a good job of delivering their message any more. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the medical profession took over the delivery if the essential spiritual messages and more people really got better?
Thanks for your offer!
Combining Phillip Griffin’s comment just above about abuse/neglect and functionality in later life with the finding Ruth Buczynski reported about spiritually-related treatment and higher energy levels (for the experimental group and lower for the controls) suggests the possibility that what was called “spiritual” treatment had in it some corrective/compensating effect on the effects of the abuse/neglect. That deserves more of a look.
Dag nabbit good stuff you whepserpnappirs!
I esteem research far above opinion. I applaud research that can show beneficial results, and it sounds like this is one example.
I am currently studying ACE reserch: Adverse Childhood Experience. Using very careful, discrete definitions (such as the difference between emotional abuse and emotional neglect), coupled with actual brain scans of children with high ACE scores, they have been able to demonstrate that early abuse impairs later functionality throughout the life span by interfering with neurological development of the brain. The implications of this research are enormous.
Same comment as before. The control group wasn’t a control for discussing values, which is a psychological construct. My students would have torn this study apart – why give studies which compare oranges and apples?! I’m a secular psychologist and hate psychological constructs being hijacked into the ‘spiritual’. How do you operationally define ‘spiritual development’, except in a circular fashion.
It is interesting that you describe yourself as secular (a word that implies religion) when speaking about an operational definition of spiritual development. For me, spirituality is a separate entity (for lack of a better word) than religion. Religion opens a much bigger, gooier can of worms than spirituality, which can encompass a far wider and more inclusive sample that can be more easily differentiated regarding values. While I appreciate your insight very much (and imagine your students are very lucky to have a teacher who can articulate so clearly the issues that affect a study) if one studies the physical effects of spiritual practices, such as meditation, effects can be measured. In this way once could conceivably define “spiritual development” in a non-circular way. Just a thought.
Secular actually implies, Non-religion
I’d say the salient point is this study shows an intervention with superior therapeutic efficacy to the standard one. Whatever the responsible mechanism, discussing values, spiritual development, or otherwise, the point is that this apple benefits patients more than that orange!
Thanks, David. I’ve replied to your einuoragcng comment on my blog.I still seem to be having problems with the email subscribing. I’m not too technical, so don’t know which end has the problem I haven’t been sent a link to the ebook.