c. 1996 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Neurosurgeon Ayub Ommaya stood in the George Washington Medical Center auditorium and told a group of medical students the story of a 9-year-old patient with a brain tumor that usually kills within a year.

The case was not only a medical anecdote; it proved to be a test of faith.

Ommaya, who is a Muslim, recalled how the girl’s father towered over him and demanded that the doctor save her life.

Ommaya turned to the girl and asked her what she thought:”She said, `My father is always right and I’m not going to die.’ She had this incredible faith. She did not want to die.” Five operations later, the girl was still alive _ and is to this day.”I went to her wedding when she was 25,”he said.

The lecture by the renowned neurosurgeon, author of more than 180 articles and the inventor of a surgical device known as the Ommaya reservoir, was part of a new program at George Washington School of Medicine, funded by a $10,000 grant from the National Institute for Healthcare Research and the John Templeton Foundation. After his speech, doctors and doctors-to-be gathered in small groups to talk about how values and beliefs might shape their medical practices.

In his lecture, Ommaya talked about the importance of faith _ both the dependence on loved ones and the belief in a higher power _ and how it can affect those who are sick.”This is a practical demonstration of what faith can achieve,”he said.

More than 120 faculty and students attended the lecture, part of a new curriculum that integrates concepts of spirituality into the technical world of medicine.”There is a biological necessity for belief,”said Ommaya, a Bethesda, Md., physician who fits Friday prayers into his busy schedule.”The way that we are brought up defines the kind of persons we are.” In his lecture, he traced the long history of how religion had often been separated from other schools of thought, with rationalism becoming the focus for students of military, business and medical schools.”They are basically people who do not believe in anything except the objective reality defined by science,”said Ommaya.

Drawing from personal experience, Ommaya said his thoughts about science and spirituality have evolved.”I got into neurosurgery primarily because I was interested in how the mind works,”he said.”I very quickly became, like most physicians become, very technical.” But being faced with certain crises, he said, can force a person to”reinterpret your data.””There are very few people who can survive any kind of illness or disease unless they have the faith in the people around them or in the spiritual faith,”he said.

Ommaya also pointed to past and present examples of the integration of spirituality and science.

Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century mathematician who developed the modern theory of probability, was also a mystic, he noted. More recently, Paul Davies became the first scientist to win the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion when he was recognized in 1995 for his work attempting to bridge the often-wide gaps between science and religion.

Dr. Christina Puchalski, the course director for the spirituality and medicine segment of the medical school’s curriculum, said there have been an increasing number of studies showing the relevance of religious practice in patients’ recovery from ailments ranging from drug abuse to heart disease to cirrhosis.”We are better physicians and truly partners in our patients’ living and in their dying if we can be compassionate, if we truly listen to their hopes, their fears, their beliefs and incorporate those beliefs into their therapeutic plans,”she wrote in an introduction to the curriculum materials.

Puchalski, a resident in internal medicine, said it was important for medical students to also address their own values and beliefs to help them as they care for patients.

Stepping away from the crush of hospital rounds and medical lectures, six third-year students gathered with Puchalski in a classroom after Ommaya’s lecture to discuss how spirituality _ their own and their patients’ _ could affect their future practices.

Puchalski, a Roman Catholic, broke the ice by telling her own story first: She had been engaged to be married to someone who died of cancer.”I had to face my own mortality and realize that we’re not … here forever,”she said.

Her spiritual search after a personal tragedy helped her to deal with the deaths of patients as she trained to be a doctor.

At first, she dreaded the times when her beeper went off and she learned that a patient had”expired.””I was blown away by the number of patients that died on me,”she said.”I’d get really attached to them.” Now, she says, she pauses for a moment of silence for the deceased patient.”I saw it as sort of a ritual,”she said.

Cheryl Collins, a third-year George Washington medical student, broke into tears as she shared with the group that she had dealt with breast cancer.”The spirituality is what got me through it,”said Collins.”It’s still what gets me through it because there’s always the fear of recurrence.” Collins, who considers herself to be a”very spiritual person”said she now prays silently for patients when she gets too preoccupied with her own troubles.

Other discussion group members ranged from one who was raised by atheist parents to another who said her life would be shaken without God. But many said their time in the hospital _ dealing with beds that suddenly were empty or replaced with new patients _ had led them to deep thoughts about life’s meaning.

Bryan Beck, a Mormon, said at first he thought his time as a medical student would disprove the need for spirituality. But he has found out otherwise.”The further you get into it, the more you realize there has to be something other than what you can explain,”he said.”The time that you have here is so short anyway. If there’s ever a scientific field that needs spirituality, it’s medicine.”

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