Group Urges Doctors to Give Spiritual Advice : Health: The Christian Medical & Dental Society wants members to offer more than just physical healing. A bioethicist says such practices need to be disclosed to patients beforehand.

A doctor’s group that wants to bring spirituality into the examining room is encouraging physicians to discuss not only prescriptions and surgery with patients, but God, too.

The Christian Medical & Dental Society is an interdenominational organization of about 9,000 doctors and dentists.

“The bottom line is, we need to change the physicians, the nurses, the people that provide the care,” said Dr. David Stevens, the new general director of the society.

“Physicians need to be more than just people that provide physical healing, but also those who can give spiritual counseling,” he said.

The society organizes volunteer medical work around the world, supports missionaries and encourages medical students and doctors to practice their faith on the job and off.

The group opposes euthanasia, surrogate motherhood and abortion, except to save a woman’s life. While it has no official position on birth control, a doctor writes in the current issue of the society’s magazine that physicians should not prescribe birth control pills for unmarried women.

Each year, the Christian Medical & Dental Society, which raises its $3 million annual budget from dues and donations, sends 1,500 doctors, dentists, nurses and volunteers on about 50 volunteer medical programs for two weeks or more. The group also is trying to encourage doctors to donate their services more in U.S. inner cities and impoverished rural areas.

“I think medicine is a natural outreach of the Christian church,” Stevens says.

“When people come into a physician’s office, they’re thinking about serious things and they’re ready for change in the way they behave, in the lifestyles. Christian physicians are in an ideal place to share more than just pills, more than just surgery, but to share something that means more to them than their profession. That’s their faith in Jesus Christ,” he said.

However, some consumer medical advocates and bioethicists said they believe physicians should let patients know beforehand if they will not carry out practices that are considered the medical standard, whatever the religious, moral or philosophical reason.

“The issue becomes one of disclosure. What I think they have to be sure to do is let their patients know what the value basis is they operate from,” said Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.