Since ancient times, spiritual teachers have described paths and practices that a person could follow to achieve health, happiness, and peace of mind. Considerable recent research has indicated that any sort of spiritual practice is likely to improve one's prognosis for recovering from a serious illness. Many of these approaches to spirituality involve learning to quiet the mind rather than adh...

BACKGROUND Although the General Medical Council recommends that United Kingdom medical students are taught 'whole person medicine', spiritual care is variably recognised within the curriculum. Data on teaching delivery and attainment of learning outcomes is lacking. This study ascertained views of Faculty and students about spiritual care and how to teach and assess competence in delivering suc...

Rhetoric about spirituality and the human search for spiritual answers has been part of history for many years, and spiritual care has been part of nursing history since ancient times (Narayanasamy 1999c). Humans have a profound need to understand their spirits (Freeman 1998), which is the core of human existence and the most elusive and mysterious constituent of our human nature (Macquarrie 19...

The neuroscience literature supports the idea that spiritual transformation is a powerful behavioral and cognitive change process involving fundamental alterations in the sense of self. Brain regions that are known to mediate the sense of self are activated during religious experiences that in turn underwrite spiritual transformation. Because religious experiences are fundamental to spiritual t...

BACKGROUND Being with dying people is an integral part of nursing, yet many nurses feel unprepared to accompany people through the process of dying, reporting a lack of skills in psychosocial and spiritual care, resulting in high levels of moral distress, grief and burnout. The aim of this study is to describe the meaning of hospice nurses' lived experience with alleviating dying patients' spir...

CONTEXT Pediatric palliative care (PPC) specialists recognize spiritual care as integral to the services offered to seriously ill children and their families. Little is known about how PPC programs deliver spiritual care. OBJECTIVE The goal of this pilot study was to begin to describe the role of professional chaplains in established PPC programs in children's hospitals in the United States. ...

BACKGROUND Religious participation or belief may predict better mental health but most research is American and measures of spirituality are often conflated with well-being. AIMS To examine associations between a spiritual or religious understanding of life and psychiatric symptoms and diagnoses. METHOD We analysed data collected from interviews with 7403 people who participated in the thir...

CONTEXT The National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care includes spiritual care as one of the eight clinical practice domains. There are very few standardized spirituality history tools. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this pilot study was to test the feasibility for the Faith, Importance and Influence, Community, and Address (FICA) Spiritual History Tool in clinical settings. Correlates...

BACKGROUND The role and effects of people's spiritual well-being have received more attention in recent years. Knowing the factors related to spiritual well-being, especially in students as the educated class and future builders of society, is too important. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of education on spirituality through social media in the spirituality well-bein...

Spirituality is increasingly recognised as an important factor in health and coping with illness. This article discusses the relevance of spirituality to medical practice, the understanding of spirituality and the implications to clinical practice, in terms of recognising spiritual distress, ethical arguments of providing spiritual care, and the approaches to managing spiritual distress.