KIE Director Sulmasy quoted on spirituality in health care on NPR and on the Hippocratic Oath in MedScape

KIE Director Dan Sulmasy, MD, PhD, has been interviewed for two recent news stories on contemporary approaches to longstanding medical practice: addressing the spiritual needs of patients, and the Hippocratic Oath.

In a January 14, 2025 story for NPR’s “All Things Considered” on increasing attention to “spiritual support in addition to physical care,” Dr. Sulmasy points out that “[w]e’ve been able to overcome taboos and talk about patients, sexual activities, their drug use, but somehow we’ve not been able to ask them about their own spiritual beliefs and practices that can really impact their own care.” Assessing the emergence of programs like one in the Indiana University Health system, profiled in the story, Sulmasy observes that such programs “may represent early efforts to bring spiritual care or, as he describes it, ‘whole person care’ back into the doctor’s office.” Sulmasy is further cited on how physicians might best overcome hesitancy to address patients’ spiritual needs: “I don’t want to advocate that physicians should become the spiritual friend of their patients or to become the patient’s chaplain, but quite often they might be the only people who really ask the question.”

The NPR story by Ben Thorp covers a topic that has been addressed at the June 2024 meeting of the American Medical Association. In March of 2024 Dr. Sulmasy wrote and spoke on spirituality in medicine in the a Perspective piece titled “Physicians, Spirituality, and Compassionate Patient Care” in the New England Journal of Medicine,

In a January 20, 2025 story in the online medical news site MedScape, titled “Lost in Modern Medicine: What Happened to the Hippocratic Oath?” Dr. Sulmasy was interviewed about the practice of medical students creating their own versions or interpretations of the Oath, something that is done at Harvard Medical School and other institutions. The MedScape story by Roni Robbins outlines some of the arguments in favor of and against the practice of updating the Oath. Dr. Sulmasy shares his critiques of and concerns about the practice, asserting that “[a] professional oath is ‘not something classmates make up. . . . It binds them to physicians around the world and a practice of thousands of years” which should be respected. Read the story