Meaning, Spirituality, and Wellness in Cancer Survivors
Section snippets
Meaning-Making and Cancer
Meaning in life refers to the value and purpose of life, important life goals, and for some, spirituality.3, 4, 5 The nature and extent of psychosocial vulnerability to potentially life-threatening illness is specific to individuals and depends on the personal meaning of the disease. Fife6 explored meaning in 38 cancer patients and identified four domains: 1) the individual's response to the illness; 2) changes that occurred relative to identity as a consequence of the illness; 3) the impact of
Spirituality and Religion
Spirituality is a construct composed of faith and meaning,5 an attempt to make contact with or become aware of the “deep knowing” of our being.9 It has been defined as being “that which allows a person to experience transcendent meaning in life.” This is often expressed as a relationship with God, but it can be about nature, art, music, family, or community–whatever beliefs and values give a person a sense of meaning and purpose in life.”10,p.129 It may emerge from religious belief or it may
Research on Spirituality and Religion
The study of religion and spirituality in health is difficult because of the challenge in defining ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality.’ Most of the literature has addressed religion and health, while the literature on spirituality and health is sparse. Religion is often represented as an institutional, structural variable and spirituality as more existential and individual, but this is not always the case.
Questions have been raised about whether religious attendance was really a surrogate marker for
Cancer as a Spiritually Transforming Experience
Some cancer survivors find their disease results in spiritual transformation. Hirshberg and Barasch33 noted that some type of spiritual experience or awakening was common to long-term survivors diagnosed with incurable disease and who had exceeded their initial prognosis of survival time. Kason34 speaks of spiritually transforming experiences that involve near-death experiences that connect individuals with another realm. People who are being transformed will find that their lives have a more
Meaning, Spirituality, and Wellness
How can cancer survivors attain maximum wellness even as they live with the residual effects of their illness and treatment? Wellness has been described as a deliberate and conscious approach by the individual to participate and advance their physical, psychosocial, and spiritual health.35, 36 Wellness programs encourage self-care to help survivors recover some control over their health and health care.36 The principles of wellness promotion are based on subjective evidence and supported by
Implications for Nurses
Although nurses often have difficulty with conflicting work demands, and may feel unsupported in meeting patients’ needs,41 much of their job satisfaction comes from contact with patients.42 However, an earlier study showed that many nurses providing spiritual care did so with some discomfort.28 In a study of Swedish nurses,28 nurses were willing to meet the spiritual and existential needs of patients but had difficulty in defining what such care should include and needed more education to
Conclusion
Programs for long- term survivors need to look not only at the very important issues of coping with long-term side effects of the disease and its treatment, financial, social and occupational issues, but also wellness for the ‘whole person.’ Issues of meaning and spirituality and their importance have been reviewed. Research issues include problems with instruments that are seen as being too Christianity-oriented and need to be broadened to include Eastern and other approaches to spirituality,
Mary L.S. Vachon, RN, PhD: Psychotherapist and Consultant in Private Practice; Professor, Departments of Psychiatry and Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto; Clinical Consultant, Wellspring, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
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The role of religion and spirituality in cancer care: An umbrella review of the literature
2022, Surgical OncologyCitation Excerpt :The oldest study was published in 1995 [31], while the most recent study was published in 2019 [4,32]. The number of studies included in each review ranged from 7 to 148,33,34 while 10 studies did not indicate a sample size [4,7,31,35–41]. Most articles did not review literature on a specific cancer diagnosis (n = 36), with the remaining studies focusing on breast and gynecological cancer (n = 4 and n = 1, respectively) [19,23,33,42,43].
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Mary L.S. Vachon, RN, PhD: Psychotherapist and Consultant in Private Practice; Professor, Departments of Psychiatry and Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto; Clinical Consultant, Wellspring, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.