Book excerpt: Learn to respond effectively and appropriately to spiritual needs in a health care setting Spirituality, Health, and Wholeness: An Introductory Guide for Health Care Professionals explores the principles of spiritual care as applied to clinical practice. This book focuses specifically on the significance of spirituality in clinical settings with practical suggestions on how to apply these principles in the healing process. With chapters that begin with clear objectives and end with guided questions, this valuable textbook provides a framework that will aid health care facilities in addressing spiritual needs in a clinical setting and help faculty in mentoring students in the field. This practical guide will help you learn when and how to address spiritual issues in health care with patients for whom illness creates a crisis of faith as well as those for whom it provides support. Spirituality, Health, and Wholeness highlights not only the importance of health care professionals in providing emotional, mental, and spiritual care, but the necessity for them to address their own spirituality as well. The book includes the experiences and case studies of skilled authorities mostly from the Judeo-Christian or Judaic tradition who identify principles that they found to be important in working with patients from a wide diversity of spiritual traditions. Spirituality, Health, and Wholeness provides you with detailed information on: “Ministryhealing”—a model of wholeness and healing that incorporates an integrated view of humanity through the four domains: spiritual, emotional, physical, and social the physiological impacts of humor and hope on mood, the neuroendocrine hormones, and the immune system spiritual coping with trauma—an overview of the research literature and how to address the spiritual coping needs and concerns of patients the role of faith in providing meaning to physical illness and the importance of the role of the health care professional in first understanding, and then assisting the patient in their struggle to find meaning the key components of spiritual care to increase the efficacy of spiritual caregivers the bereavement process with regard to religious, cultural, and gender variations, and the role of the healthcare professional in providing support This book shows you not only how to meet the spiritual needs of patients from a diversity of faith traditions, but how to overcome challenges to your own spirituality, such as “difficult” patients and patients whose cultural outlook is so different from your own it causes discomfort. Spirituality, Health, and Wholeness will help all health care professionals who want to bring spirituality into their medical, dental, nursing, occupational therapy, or physical therapy practice.