Medical education and spirituality

Spirituality is a characteristic of human beings that seeks to develop their spiritual dimension as distinct from the material one. It proposes to search a fundamental sense for existence, in the certainty of the spirit's immortality and the existence of higher divine entities that play roles as creators, maintainers and helpers in all cosmological processes. The belief in metaphysical truths, both intuitive and revealed, originated religions, that are formed by great doctrinal systems and cultic ritual procedures that propose to make sacred almost all phases of peoples' life. Religions have an important influence in civilization's cultural evolution process since times immemorial. In medical education, the excessive valuation of the technological and scientific aspects of the profession, which become extraordinarily stronger after the Flexner Report, at the end made medical students distance themselves from ethical-humanistic education, and this latter, besides being disregard was not rarely considered superfluous or even ridiculous. But no doubt people beliefs affect radically their worldview and influences this way all their attitudes and decisions. This influence can facilitate or make difficult their interpersonal relations, including the relationship doctor-patient. Taking spirituality into account in the education of Bioethics purposes to increase students knowledge about the different religions and to offer cognitive resources for the resolution of possible conflicts that can arise in the relationship doctor-patient-family, besides giving spirituality the statute of a constitutive instance of human beings, developing mechanisms of respect and tolerance in regard to patients, which are seen as whole and autonomous beings.