Is there a Way of Medicine for Christians – October 22nd at 7:00pm ET

What is medicine and what is it for? What does it mean to be a good doctor? In this talk, Dr. Farr Curlin argues that the profession of medicine is caught between two rival accounts of medicine. On what he and Christopher Tollefsen call “the provider of services model”, clinicians eschew any claim to know what is good for a patient and instead offer an array of “health care services” for the sake of the patient’s subjective well-being. Against this trend, Curlin will argue that practitioners should recover what he and Tollefsen call the Way of Medicine, which offers physicians both a path out of the provider of services model and also the moral resources necessary to sustain medicine as a practice devoted to healing. Dr. Curlin will explain the Way of Medicine and consider how Christianity affirms and elevates medicine, rightly understood, as a sacred practice that participates in, without presuming to displace, God’s healing of the world.

Objectives:

Describe two rival accounts of what medicine is for, and analyze common ethical questions in the ethical frameworks that accompany these two accounts

Explain how the Church fathers understood medicine and its place in the Christian’s vocation

Identify two steps they can take to contend courageously for good medicine

Dr. Farr Curlin is a hospice and palliative care physician who joined Duke University in January 2014 where he holds joint appointments in the School of Medicine, including its Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine, and in Duke Divinity School, including its Initiative on Theology, Medicine and Culture. He works with Duke colleagues to foster scholarship, study, and training regarding the intersections of medicine, ethics, and religion. After graduating from medical school, he completed internal medicine residency training and fellowships in both health services research and clinical ethics at the University of Chicago before joining its faculty in 2003. Dr. Curlin’s empirical research charts the influence of physicians’ moral traditions and commitments, both religious and secular, on physicians’ clinical practices. As an ethicist, he addresses questions regarding whether and in what ways physicians’ religious commitments ought to shape their clinical practices in a plural democracy. Dr. Curlin and colleagues have authored numerous manuscripts published in medicine and bioethics literature, including a New England Journal of Medicine paper titled, “Religion, Conscience and Controversial Clinical Practices.” He is particularly concerned with the moral and spiritual dimensions of medical practice and the doctor-patient relationship, and with the moral and professional formation of physicians. His areas of expertise are medicine, medical ethics, doctor-patient relationship, religion and medicine, and conscience. At the University of Chicago, Dr. Curlin founded and was co-director of the Program on Medicine and Religion.