March 28, 2024

American doctors profess their faith

American doctors are a religious lot. A survey of 1,044 doctors has found that 76% believe in God, 59% believe in an afterlife, and 55% allow their religious beliefs to influence how they practice medicine. “We were surprised to find that physicians were as religious as they apparently are,” said Dr Farr Curlin, of the University Chicago’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. The president of the American Medical Association, Dr J. Edward Hill, commented that belief in a supreme being is “vitally important to physicians’ ability to take care of patients, particularly the end-of-life issues that we deal with so often.”