U.S. physicians who identify themselves as religious are no more likely to care for poor, underserved patients than those who have no religious affiliation, researchers have found.
The study suggests doctors in the United States who see religion as a “master motive in their lives” are not more likely to care for the poor than others.
“Religious physicians are not disproportionately caring for the underserved,” Dr. Farr Curlin, of the University of Chicago, said in a telephone interview on Monday.
Curlin, who considers himself religious, said he undertook the study because many religions include a call to serve the poor.
“I was curious about whether doctors who are more formed in their religious beliefs are more likely to take care of patients who are poor,” said Curlin, whose study appears in the Annals of Family Medicine.
He and colleagues at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut mailed surveys to 1,820 practicing doctors. Of those, 63 percent responded.
The researchers ranked “intrinsic religiosity” according to how physicians answered questions about the role of religion as a motive in their lives.
Physicians also answered questions about how frequently they attended religious services, the extent they considered themselves to be spiritual and whether they believed the practice of medicine was a calling.
What they found was physicians who were deemed more religious as reflected by intrinsic religiosity or frequency of attendance of religious services were not more likely to report caring for underserved patient populations — those that tended to be poor, uninsured or on Medicaid, the federal program for the poor.
“It suggests, I think, that when doctors are making the connection between being people of faith and the practice of medicine, that connection does not seem to lead them ... to an added commitment to caring for the underserved,” Curlin said.