Philosophical essay on mindfulness, religion, and patient care

instances of disease; they treat patients as less than the human persons they are. Physicians, it would seem, are subject to a particular form of the more general psychological challenge of paying attention to other minds. Like all humans, physicians easily ignore the mindfulness of others. This matters, Epley reminds us, “because mindful agents become moral agents worthy of care and compassion.” As such, patients who are seen as mindful “evoke empathy and concern for well-being, whereas agents without mindful experience can be treated simply as mindless objects.” There are obstacles to recognizing the mindfulness of patients. Illness makes a patient different, or deviant, from human norms, and we tend to pay less attention to the minds of those who are different from ourselves. In addition, “Considering other minds requires some attentional effort. It does not come automatically.” Physicians learn to go through the technical motions of caring for the sick until those motions become ‘automatic’—that is the mark of a skilled and effective clinician. But paying attention to the mindfulness of patients requires a sustained investment of time and energy that physicians are often unwilling to make. How could religious practices help? As Luhrmann notes, most people find it very difficult to pay attention to God. To help in this difficult and lifelong task, many religions have developed disciplines of prayer and other practices that call to mind what we tend to forget—including the ideas that motivate genuine human concern for those who suffer. Christians, for example, practice remembering that all people are ultimately united as children of the one creator God, that “the ground is level at the foot of the cross” 144 Page regardless of one’s social status, one’s biological fitness or one’s reproductive capacity. Epley notes that we are better able to pay attention to what another is thinking or feeling when we are motivated to do so. Christianity seeks to stimulate such motivation by encouraging Christians to meditate on the fact that Jesus comes to us in those who are sick and otherwise suffer’. Moreover, it reminds us that we are never alone. As Katherine Tanner details in her chapter, God is always with us. This central theological claim, when remembered in song, prayer, liturgy, reading of Scriptures and other rituals, provides a particular form of what psychologists call “mindful surveillance”—our actions become more “prosocial” (even altruistic) when we are aware of being observed by others. All of these practices depend on and extend the capacities of the social brain. They are also, from the vantage of Christianity, ways in which one may come to receive grace, the unmerited help of God. Religious practices have therefore at least the potential to encourage and strengthen the human capacity for attending to the mindfulness, and therefore the personhood, of those who are sick and diminished. As Epley suggests, “Making minds visible, and hence more like one’s own, enables people to more readily follow the most famous of all ethical dictates—to treat others as you would have others treat you.” Conclusion Science and religion are invisibly and inextricably intertwined in the practice of medicine. Science has provided modern medicine with extraordinary diagnostic and therapeutic HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021390