Healthcare Professionals Discuss How Connecting with Patients’ Spirituality Could Lead To Better Care

FORT WORTH – Taking a few moments to listen to a patient’s story and incorporating their thoughts into a medical treatment plan should not be treated as an afterthought by healthcare professionals,  according to Jeffrey P. Bishop, M.D., Ph.D., Tenet Endowed Chair in Bioethics at Saint Louis University.   

Those stories often give insight into a patient’s spiritual beliefs and how they perceive the medical care they are receiving, he said.

“In medicine, sometimes we think religion may tell them we can’t do this kind of thing in surgery or a patient might choose not to do something because of their religious beliefs,” Dr. Bishop said. “That’s true on one level but really we need to understand what a patient believes about their religion and the meaning of that patient’s life in order to take care of them when something is threatening their life.” 

Dr. Bishop was the keynote speaker for the 2026 Health Care in a Civil Society symposium held at the Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University in February.   

His keynote titled, “Creating Narrative Bonds To Take Care Of The Whole Patient: From Naturalistic Psychiatry To Narrative Transfiguration” touched on the connection healthcare providers can give to psychiatric patients when they connect the patient’s spirituality to their medical treatments.   

“Every person has a north star that guides their life,” Dr. Bishop said. “If I’m a doctor and I’m trying to help them achieve what their north star says, it’s nice to know what that north star will be.” 

More than 100 health care providers from across North Texas attended the event in-person and online. There were two panel discussions with Dr. Bishop; Stephen Couch, MA, Clinical Ethicist at Children’s Health – Dallas; Devan Stahl, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Bioethics & Religion at Baylor University and Adjunct Professor at Baylor College of Medicine; and Kimbell Kornu, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Bioethics, Theology, and Christian Formation at Belmont University with Pete Geren, J.D., President and CEO of Sid Richardson Foundation, as the moderator for both discussions. The annual conference was organized by Stuart Pickell, M.D., MDiv., Professor of Internal Medicine at Burnett School of Medicine at TCU.  

Dr. Pickell, who is also a minister, said focusing this year’s event on spirituality and medicine is something many healthcare professionals may not realize is important to their patients. 

“I think it encourages healthcare professionals to embrace curiosity and understand where the patient may be coming from,” Dr. Pickell said.  

Dr. Bishop explored this dynamic by telling a story about a patient named Nonnie and her battle with schizophrenia. She was studying to become an actress at a university, and all was well until the fall of 2016. 

“Her grades slipped a bit, and she began getting more into conspiracy theories,” Dr. Bishop said. During “the summer between her freshman and sophomore years, her personality changed, and she became more arrogant and assertive and even more aggressive.”  

He said that Nonnie’s behavior became more unpredictable over the years. In 2021, she finally shared with her parents that she had been having delusions and hallucinations, which usually had religious context each time she shared a story with them.  

That started the long and difficult process of Nonnie being admitted into a hospital and receiving medical treatments for her mental illness.  

Madeline Belknap, MS1, at Burnett School of Medicine, attended the conference and found a lot of insight in Dr. Bishop’s keynote.  

“A lot of times people have more going on in their life than just their physical ailments,” Belknap said.  

Over time, Nonnie’s health and her symptoms slowly improved. However, aligning medical care with a patient’s religious beliefs means that there will be tough conversations, Dr. Bishop added. 

“Some things, we’ll have to say that we can’t do that because it won’t help you medically and we also honor things that do not align with their religious beliefs and we don’t force them to do those things,” Dr. Bishop said. “But we need to have the conversation. We are often willing to make those negotiations around things like medications because of a patient’s importance of religion in their lives.” 

The Burnett School of Medicine’s unique Empathetic Scholar® curriculum puts a emphasis on preparing future physicians to “walk in a patient’s shoes” while excelling in the science of medicine. 

“The two things that matter are curiosity and care,” Dr. Pickell said. “You need to be smart enough to know the medicine and understand how it works but you need to be curious. Curious enough to ask the right questions and then care enough to follow up on them.”  

Maintaining a high level of curiosity, continuing to be a lifelong learner, and advocating for her future patients is something Belknap wants to do.  

“For me in my career, I know I’ll probably have a lot of really difficult conversations with patients,” Belknap said. “Gathering those practical skills on how to initiate those conversations is a lifelong skill to work on and to develop.” 

Having a medical school curriculum that emphasizes the importance of communication for future physicians is very important, Dr. Bishop added.  

“Physicians have hard conversations all the time; it’s not any harder to have this conversation around religion,” Dr. Bishop said. “We just got to be open; we’ve got to be honest and trusting. It gives us the patient’s north star and then we can go back to that and align all that we can do to help them.”