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Christian Bioethics Advance Access published online on November 10, 2009
Christian Bioethics, doi:10.1093/cb/cbp017
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of The Journal of Christian Bioethics, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Biopsychosociospiritual Medicine and Other Political Schemes

Jeffrey P. Bishop

Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

Address correspondence to: Jeffrey P. Bishop, MD, PhD, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA. E-mail: jeffrey.bishop{at}vanderbilt.edu


  Abstract

In the mid-1970s, the biomedical model of medicine gave way to the biopsychosocial model of medicine; it was billed as a more comprehensive and compassionate model of medicine. After more than a century of disentangling medicine from religion, the medicine and spirituality movement is attempting to bring religion and spirituality back into medicine. It is doing so under a biopsychosociospiritual model. I unpack one model for allowing religion back into medicine called the RCOPE. RCOPE is an instrument designed to categorize religion and spirituality as psychological coping mechanisms. I explore how such instruments are related to the history of statistical measurement and demonstrate the political impetus that governs such enterprises. The biopsychosociospiritual medicine is billed as a more holistic and comprehensive model. This new model of medicine offers total care. However, I demonstrate how this total care becomes totalizing, indeed totalitarian, admitting religion and spirituality back into the fold of medicine under a new secularized medical control.

Keywords: biopolitics, biopsychosocial model, biopsychosociospiritual model, RCOPE, religion and medicine


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