Honoring the Medicine: searching for the embodiment of spiritual commitment and philosophy for student physicians

Honoring the Medicine is a project that grew from an assignment that I created for an online course I developed entitled "Introduction to Spirituality and Medicine." In an effort to create a consciousness that would explore the sacred oaths of the practice of medicine, I asked medical students who took the course to write their own sacred oath of healing that they would carry into their practice of medicine. Participants were asked to read the Hippocratic Oath and the Osteopathic Oath and to reflect on the ethical and humanistic aspects of each. Participants identified various areas of importance including the integration of mind, body and soul, empathy, compassion, and respect. Every participant identified their own attributes of healing. This exemplifies how 1 community--the medical community--can search deeper inside themselves to create a sacred model for humanistic medicine. This model is one that identifies attributes that all communities can practice in their lives, for the humanistic model touches every community and every community member.