Spring 2015 Health, Religion, and Spirituality Courses

Spirituality and Healing in Medicine

Site: Harvard Medical School
Course Directors: Michael D'Ambra and John Peteet
Time: Spring 2015 TBA
Description: This course provides students with a framework for understanding the spiritual dimension of issues they will confront in the practice of medicine. These include patients' struggles with questions of faith, spiritual approaches to problems such as life threatening illness or addiction, and the personal commitments that underline professionalism. Faculty will offer a model approaching these issues, lead discussion using clinical examples, and facilitate opportunities for extra- classroom experiences, such as working with a hospital chaplain or with spiritual or faith-based programs of healing. Invited presentations from chaplains, clergy and physicians will explore the implications for medicine of various religious and secular traditions, and issues surrounding the role of the clinician in responding to spiritual needs. They will also serve as resources for presentations by students to the class.

Religion and Public Health
Site: Harvard School of Public Health
Course Director: Tyler VanderWeele
Time: January 12-16, 2015 with lectures 10:30am-12:20pm every day and 1:30pm-3:20pm on Monday, Tuesday and Friday
Description: The course will give an overview of the current state of research on the relationship between religion and health. Over the past three decades, the research literature documenting this relationship has grown dramatically. Religious participation has been shown to have protective effects on all-cause mortality, mental health, cardiovascular health, cancer survival, and many other health outcomes. The course will review the research that has been done in this area, discuss some of the measurement and methodological challenges faced by this research, and explore future research directions in religion and health as well as questions of relevance to public health. Specific topics will include religious participation and longevity, religion and mental health, religious communities and health, and religion and spirituality in end of life care. Attention will be given throughout to questions of measurement, study design, and methodology, and the challenges in conducting rigorous research in this area. Pre-requisites are basic epidemiology and biostatistics.