06/02/2026
Neurological diseases like Parkinson’s can profoundly transform a person’s spiritual life. These illnesses often alter not just how the body works, but how the mind functions, how much autonomy a person has, how they relate to loved ones. Many patients struggle to find meaning and purpose in the face of such deep existential loss. Modern medicine in the West has very little to say about such spiritual matters. But some doctors would like to change that.
A group of physicians and a patient with Parkinson’s recently jointly published a paper in the journal Neurology Clinical Practice that argues spiritual care should become a routine part of neurological care. The authors of the new paper cite a study of 1,000 adults that found that among patients 18 years old and older, 60 percent would like this kind of spiritual support in medical settings. But many neurologists lack the training to provide it, or feel uncomfortable asking their patients about such intimate and personal matters.
The researchers—from UCLA Health, the University of Colorado, Harvard Medical School, and Brown University—offer guidance to clinicians about how they can make spirituality a part of their care—what to watch for, what questions to ask, how to listen. It’s part of a larger movement that advocates for the provision of spiritual care for patients with all kinds of serious illnesses, which has been shown to improve both physical and mental health outcomes.
Nautilus recently spoke with patient co-author and blogger Kirk Hall, who has Parkinson’s, and lead author Indu Subramanian, a movement disorders neurologist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The conversation covered why spiritual care is so important to medicine, why neurologists are unprepared to discuss spiritual matters, how the doctor-patient relationship has changed over the past 50 years, and what simple things neurologists can do to ensure that their patients feel spiritually supported.
Read the conversation: https://nautil.us/the-doctors-who-say-spirituality-belongs-in-medicine-1279248