Introduction: The Resurgence of Interest in Spirituality and Health

Interest has grown among health care professionals and the public in the relationship between spirituality and health. Literature searches show a large increase, beginning in the late 1980s, in the number of research articles that address this topic. In 1995, Harvard Medical School’s Department of Continuing Education and the Mind/Body Institute of Boston’s Deaconess Hospital sponsored their first national conference on Spirituality and Healing in Medicine. The large attendance and interest resulted in a series of follow-up conferences held throughout the United States over several years. In 1997, the Association of American Medical Colleges and the National Institute for Healthcare Research ¹ cosponsored their first conference for medical school educators on spirituality in the medical school curriculum. By 2001, over seventy of the 125 allopathic schools of medicine in the United States offered required or elective courses in spirituality and medicine compared with just one school in 1992 (Puchalski, 2001).