Study Group Spirituality and Medicine

at the Chair of Medical Theory and Complementary Medicine of the University Witten/Herdecke

Publications of our research group Congress on "Spirituality, Illness and Healing", October 28th/29th, 2005 in Arlesheim (Switzerland

Announcement of the Universität Witten/Herdecke

Introduction

Spirituality has become a subject of growing interest in health care. The World Health Organization suggests that spiritual needs are an essential component of holistic health care assessment. Several scientific papers discuss the connection between religiosity resp. spirituality and health, its potential to prevent, heal or cope with diseases. Moreover, spirituality correlated significantly with several coping styles. Spiritual well-being offers some protection against hopelessness and despair in terminally ill patients. Nevertheless, there is less doubt that values and goals are important contributors to life satisfaction, physical and psychological health, and that goals are what gives meaning and purpose to people´s lives.

But in face of a life-threatening disease, do patients find meaning and purpose in their life?

Many of them rely on religious beliefs to relieve stress, to retain a sense of control, and to maintain hope and their sense of meaning and purpose in life, while others may lose faith in their religious beliefs, and seek for alternatives.

There is as yet but limited understanding of how patients themselves view the impact of spirituality on their health and well-being, and whether they are convinced that their illness may have meaning to them. To raise these questions and to more precisely survey the basic attitudes of patients with severe diseases towards spirituality/religiosity (SpR) and their adjustment to their illness, we developed the SpREUK questionnaire.

SpREUK Questionnaire

The SpREUK questionnaire (SpREUK is an acronym of the German translation of "Spiritual and Religious Attitudes in Dealing with Illness") was designed in order to examine attitudes of patients with life-threatening and chronic diseases towards spirituality/religiosity. It appears to be a good choice for assessing a patients interest in spiritual concerns which is not biased for or against a particular religious commitment. Moreover, as several patients may be offended by institutional religion, even terms such as God, Jesus, praying, church etc. were avoided.

The main construct, the  SpREUK 1.2 (32 Items: Cronbach´ s alpha = 0.929 resp. 0.962) measures the following dimensions:

(1) Search for meaningful support,

(2) Trust in higher source,

(3) Message of disease,

(4) Support in relations of life through spirituality/religiosity,

For the SpREUK questionnaire we deliberately avoided the intermingling of attitudes, convictions and practices, and thus addressed the distinct forms and frequencies of spiritual/religious practices in an additional manual, the SpREUK-P questionnaire. It was designed to differentiate spiritual, religious, existentialistic and philosophical practices.

The SpREUK-P 1.2 (30 items: Cronbach`s alpha = 0.915) has the following scales:

(1) conventional religious practice (CRP),

(2) humanistic practice (HuP),

(3) existentialistic insight practice (ExIP),

(4) unconventional spiritual practice (USP),

(5) existentialistic development practice (ExDP),

(6) gratitude practice (GrP),

(7) nature/environment-oriented practice (NoP),

The conventional SpREUK (Version 1.2), its 22-item short version (SpREUK-SF22) and the SpREUK-P manual (Version 1.2) are currently available in English and German.

Aim of our work

It is the intention that our research may contribute to an improvement of treatment and caring for the patients. Apart from a general sensibilization for this topic, our results could help to adjust the offers of hospitals and services (medical doctors, nurses, psychotherapists, art therapists etc.) to the prevalent needs of the patients.

One patient with a rapidly progressive carcinoma of the lung reported that she felt delivered and saved after attending a prayer group and a meditation group, despite the rapid progression of her disease.

To our opinion, it is of eminent importance that spirituality is integrated (again) in modern medicine. Regardless of their own belief system, physicians should not allow their own bias to blind them to the possibility that religion and spiritual beliefs play an important role for many of their patients. On the other hand, religiosity/spirituality should not be reduced to that function of "last hope"; which remains when doctors, psychologists, social workers etc. have left the patient.

Contact

PD Dr. med. Arndt Büssing

Chair of Medical Theory and Complementary Medicine

University Witten/Herdecke

Gerhard-Kienle-Weg 4, -58313 Herdecke, Germany

phone: ++49-2330-623246 eMail: arndt.buessing [et] uni-wh.de or ArBuess [et] yahoo.de