Over the Christmas vacation I conducted an interview with Dr Mrinal Patnaik, M.B.B.S., a physician-scientist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota to gain some primary research for my Extended Project Qualification based on the relationship between religious spirituality and public health. His responses to my questions were so interesting and hard-hitting that I felt obligated to share them!
He said that, predictably, when someone hears they have a chronic illness, their life is suddenly turned around, and they get quite sick. However, people who have strong faiths, regardless of who or what they believe in, are mentally stronger and able to withstand a lot more because their faith acts as a pillar of emotional strength and hope. For them, even the worst – death – means they are going back to their creator, and so it gives them a sense of peace and ease during a testing time.
However, there is another side to this. Though sometimes, when people have faith in God or faith in their religion and religious leaders, they are more amenable to listen to their doctor’s advice, at others, the converse is true: patients downright refuse treatment and cancel surgery, believing that God will cure them completely. Dr Patnaik once had a patient who had breast cancer. She came to him and just refused the chemotherapy. Instead of making her feel inferior or unintelligent, he decided to empathise with her, and shared with her his faith in God; he said that he did believe that God would cure her but that it was important for her to take the right steps to allow Him to do this. Unfortunately, she was not convinced, so he spoke to her family, who didn’t listen; finally, he spoke to her church pastor who convinced her to undergo the surgery and her life was saved.
Another example he gave concerned a community in the US called the Hmong community; they’re mountain people from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, who during the Vietnam War, moved to the US. If a person from the Hmong community has cancer, any decision making will first go to their temple, and sometimes doctors must talk to their religious leaders before the patient will accept treatment. He shared how in this scenario his approach would be to try to understand where certain actions or recommendations are coming from and the thought process behind them.
To be succinct, from what Dr Patnaik told me, I think it’s all about being prepared to hear answers that may not be conventional and being humble in accepting them. At the end of the day, even doctors can’t win every battle and there are a significant number of patients that die each year due to refusal of modern medication.
My research has led me to conclude that there is a fine line between faith and blind faith. If you have faith, but you’re still in tune with listening to recommendations and you’re able to merge your faith with modern medicine, I think that’s the best outcome. It’s the natural human reaction to be condescending when you hear something that is not in alignment with intellectual norms, but the United States is such a cosmopolitan society with people from so many faiths and beliefs that it’s very important to suppress that reaction, and to try to understand where they’re coming from.
