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In the medical humanities, much of the current pedagogical focus on religion has been on religion’s healing or instrumental properties. How does religious ritual facilitate healing? How can traditional healing modalities contribute to the well-being and recovery of patients? Can prayer shorten a patient's recovery time? Although these questions are critically important for understanding religion’s influence on healthcare systems, this approach has a tendency to reduce religion to a certain instrumentality that neglects religion’s broader role in cultivating and maintaining the overall well-being and health of a population. Moreover, such approaches have been criticized for failing to recognize religion's critical role in shaping the ethical and moral frameworks that inform healthcare decision-making processes (Koenig, Peteet, and VanderWeele 2024).
In light of these critiques, this paper explores how the study of religion can be effectively integrated into a medical and health humanities curriculum and provide graduate and undergraduate students with a deeper understanding of religion’s influence on the health and well-being of diverse populations. Based on my personal first-hand experiences of developing and implementing an experiential learning course, the primary focus of this paper is on the more practical aspects of integrating the study of religion into medical curricula and providing concrete guidance to other educators on best practices, actionable insights, and pedagogical strategies that address some of the challenges encountered at a university when implementing an interdisciplinary course. In particular, this paper devotes specific attention to the way in which community partnerships can be used to address some of the administrative and social challenges involved in trying to incorporate Hispanic and indigenous health traditions into the mainstream curriculum standards for pre-med and nursing students.
Community partnerships are an important pedagogical tool for the study of religion when it comes to grounding medical education in the dynamic religious practices and indigenous knowledge systems that inform a community's health cultures and traditions. Religion scholar Ellen Idler has drawn specific attention to the varying ways in which community partnerships between religious institutions and public health and medical agencies can address health disparities and also contribute to a more fuller and dynamic understanding of religion’s critical role as a social determinant of health (E. L. Idler 2014; E. Idler et al. 2019). Following Idler’s argument, approaching religion as a social determinant of health goes beyond an instrumental approach to religion, underscoring religion’s multifaceted influences on a community’s health and healthcare-seeking behaviors. By recognizing religion as a social determinant of health, healthcare practitioners and educators can better understand how religion might positively and negatively influence indicators of public health, such as mortality rates, life expectancy, and health disparities. Moreover, this recognition of religion as a social determinant of health entails the creation of community partnerships between health and religious institutions, since collaborative partnerships offer the opportunity to address historical conflicts and long standing issues of mistrust while simultaneously enriching medical and health practitioners' understanding of religion’s institutional significance and larger role in shaping health behaviors and attitudes.
Drawing upon Idler’s framework, I provide a detailed analysis of the way in which I was able to collaborate with my colleagues in the school of osteopathic medicine and nursing to create an experiential learning course for nursing and pre-med students. In detailing my experiences, I pay special attention in the paper to the ethical and logistical challenges encountered in the development of community partnerships with curanderos, botánicos, and traditional healers. Given the university's status as a Hispanic Serving Institution and its location in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, these community partnerships were critical for fostering the university’s larger community engagement efforts and enhancing students' understanding of religious syncretism's evolving role in shaping the local culture and health systems.
Among the major challenges detailed in this paper includes language barriers as well as long standing distrust between traditional healers and medical practitioners with some of the local traditional healers who participated in the course expressing reservations about sharing their knowledge and religious practices with academic and medical institutions and potentially violating sacred religious rituals and customs. The paper devotes significant attention to addressing biopiracy concerns and the intellectual appropriation of traditional and religious health knowledge as well as strategies for promoting ethical engagement and collaboration. In addition to covering these challenges, the paper also provides a course reading list as well as examples of course assignments, including discussion of the course’s collaborative final project. By sharing my experiences and insights, I aim to support educators in similar situations as they work to integrate the study of religion into health and medical curricula, ultimately enhancing understanding and awareness of religion’s critical role as a social determinant of health.
Bibliography
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Burchardt, Marian. 2017. Faith in the Time of AIDS: Religion, Biopolitics and Modernity in South Africa. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
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Idler, Ellen L. 2014. Religion as a Social Determinant of Public Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Idler, Ellen, Jeff Levin, Tyler J. VanderWeele, and Anwar Khan. 2019. “Partnerships Between Public Health Agencies and Faith Communities.” American Journal of Public Health 109 (3): 346–47. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304941.
Koenig, Harold G., John R. Peteet, and Tyler VanderWeele. 2024. Handbook of Religion and Health. Cambridge: Oxford University Press.
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Torres, Eliseo “Cheo,” and Timothy L. Sawyer. 2014. Curandero: A Life in Mexican Folk Healing. Albuquerque: UNM Press.
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Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
This paper provides a first-hand analysis of the challenges and obstacles involved in establishing community partnerships with curanderos, botánicos, and traditional healers and integrating traditional healing modalities into a medical humanities curriculum at a Hispanic Serving Institution. Religion scholar Ellen Idler has been particularly adamant about the benefits of integrating the study of religion into health education and advocated for a more comprehensive and dynamic understanding of the religious and historical dimensions of health systems. More specifically, Idler argues that religion should be recognized as a social determinant of health, since religious beliefs, practices, and institutional structures significantly influence health decisions and behaviors. In this paper, I explain how I was able to effectively draw upon Idler's framework and develop an experiential learning course for pre-med and nursing students that enabled them to gain first-hand exposure of Hispanic communities’ diverse religious cultures and health practices.