252 Being a Doctor After Being a Patient
Stunningly, Eleanor’s lack of knowledge about her husband’s beliefs
underlined how private spiritual beliefs can be, and how much people are
afraid or unwilling to discuss them.
Issues surfaced, too, as to whether and how physicians and trainees
could be more sensitive to spiritual issues. Some physicians felt that
many colleagues were antipathetic toward religion, and that as a result,
spirituality could not be taught. Roxanne said, ‘‘You can’t teach it. Spiri-
tuality is a gift. Either you feel it or you don’t. How come people don’t
have the feeling? I don’t know. I give it all to God.’’
Yet physicians can nonetheless increase their sensitivity to the im-
portance of these realms in many patients’ lives, even if they do not share
these beliefs.
In all, spirituality aided many of these physicians in confronting serious
illness, through a wide variety of forms and contents of beliefs and
practices. Heightened awareness of these issues can potentially strengthen
the relationships between doctors and patients, improving their experi-
ences as they each grapple with disease. Some physicians, who felt a
connection to spirituality before their own illness, became more spiritual
post-diagnosis, or found that their spiritual inclinations and understand-
ings evolved over time. Many doctors followed traditional religions or
mixed and matched beliefs.
Surprisingly, other physicians who saw the benefits of spirituality for
their patients, and wanted to become more spiritual themselves, none-
theless had difficulty finding spiritual meaning. Key questions arose as to
who is ‘‘touched by the light’’ and why, and why others are not. The
reasons appeared to be manifold. Depression may provoke religious doubt
and, conversely, religious doubt may prompt or aggravate depression. In
other ways, too, spirituality appeared not to be fully voluntary, but tied to
complicated and unclear processes. Some people simply appeared more
inclined to believe than others.
Yet in part because spirituality cannot necessarily be willed, questions
arose as to the degree to which it can be taught. These issues are im-
portant because physicians who are not ‘‘spiritually inclined’’ may find it
harder to communicate with patients about spirituality in ways that
patients find helpful.
The fact that several of these physicians did not feel themselves to be
spiritual, but engaged in activities and held beliefs that an outside observer
might perceive as spiritual, underscored the difficulty of assessing or