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What Should Physicians and Chaplains Do When a Patient Believes God Wants Him to Suffer?

Overview of attention for article published in AMA Journal of Ethics, July 2018
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Mentioned by

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1 news outlet
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19 tweeters

Citations

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1 Dimensions

Readers on

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31 Mendeley
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Title
What Should Physicians and Chaplains Do When a Patient Believes God Wants Him to Suffer?
Published in
AMA Journal of Ethics, July 2018
DOI 10.1001/amajethics.2018.613
Pubmed ID
Abstract

When physicians encounter a patient who gives religious reasons for wanting to suffer, physicians should maintain their commitment to the patient's health while making room for religiously informed understandings of suffering and respecting the patient's authority to refuse medically indicated interventions. Respecting the patient can include challenging the patient's reasoning, and physicians can decline to participate in interventions that they believe contradict their professional commitments. Chaplains likewise should both support and possibly respectfully challenge a patient in instances that involve desire to suffer for religious reasons, and physicians should draw on chaplains' expertise in these situations to attend to the patient's spiritual concerns. Finally, conversations involving spiritual and existential suffering might include members of the patient's religious community when the patient is open to this option.

Twitter Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 19 tweeters who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 31 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 31 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Bachelor 6 19%
Researcher 4 13%
Student > Master 3 10%
Student > Doctoral Student 2 6%
Unspecified 2 6%
Other 4 13%
Unknown 10 32%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Medicine and Dentistry 9 29%
Nursing and Health Professions 3 10%
Unspecified 2 6%
Neuroscience 2 6%
Psychology 2 6%
Other 3 10%
Unknown 10 32%