five - Health

Summary

Summary

• All world religions emphasise the importance of health and physical wellbeing through, for example, religious teachings to visit the sick, rituals of cleanliness and the metaphysical power of religious practices and beliefs such as prayer and faith to heal mental and physical ailments.

• Religious and spiritual perspectives on health emphasise holistic approaches to wellbeing that look beyond the physiological symptoms of illness, thereby challenging the narrow biomedical approach to healthcare. The NHS systems in the devolved nations of the UK have produced guidelines for integrating religious and spiritual considerations into patient care, with Scotland being clearer and more successful than England. The Sussex Partnership Trust is one of the few examples of an NHS ‘spirituality strategy’ in England.

• NHS hospital chaplaincy has become formally institutionalised and publicly funded since it is seen to contribute to better patient care. But experiences vary with regard to the extent to which chaplains see themselves as constituting a formal part of healthcare provision. Better understanding among healthcare professionals of the religious background of patients, especially of less well-known non-Christian faiths, could help reduce health inequalities.

• Religious organisations undertake a variety of health support, palliative care and health provision services such as the hospice movement or the Jewish Haredi community in North London whose childbirth programme has been formally adopted by the local primary care trust (PCT).

Introduction

In this chapter, we look at the issue of illness and the maintenance of health – the meaning and purpose of the human body in daily human affairs as well as in medical intervention is a matter of perennial importance to all the world religions.

First, there are the teachings and principles in virtually all of the major world religions. The missionary religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) call on believers to tend to the needs of the sick and infirm, such as the Jewish principle of bikur cholim (visiting the sick) (Kohn, 2010, p 121), the saying of the Prophet Muhammad in the Islamic faith, ‘Give food to the hungry and pay a visit to the sick’ (cited in Mavani, 2010, p 95) or in Christianity, the significance of Jesus Christ's healing ministry, which inspired the establishment of Christian hospitals worldwide, not to mention the hospice movement in the UK which began in 1967 (Bursey, 2010).