Hindawi Publishing Corporation Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Volume 2012, Article ID 693092, 8 pages doi:10.1155/2012/693092 Review Article Reﬂections on Palliative Care from the Jewish and Islamic Tradition Michael Schultz,1 Kassim Baddarni,2 and Gil Bar-Sela1 1 Division of Oncology, Rambam Health Care Campus, Faculty of Medicine, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 9602, Haifa 31096, Israel 2 Al-Taj for Health and Heritage Organization, Arraba 30812, Israel Correspondence should be addressed to Michael Schultz, m schultz@rambam.health.gov.il Received 21 September 2011; Accepted 24 October 2011 Academic Editor: Peter Heusser Copyright © 2012 Michael Schultz et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Spiritual care is a vital part of holistic patient care. Awareness of common patient beliefs will facilitate discussions about spirituality. Such conversations are inherently good for the patient, deepen the caring staﬀ-patient-family relationship, and enhance understanding of how beliefs inﬂuence care decisions. All healthcare providers are likely to encounter Muslim patients, yet many lack basic knowledge of the Muslim faith and of the applications of Islamic teachings to palliative care. Similarly, some of the concepts underlying positive Jewish approaches to palliative care are not well known. We outline Jewish and Islamic attitudes toward suﬀering, treatment, and the end of life. We discuss our religions’ approaches to treatments deemed unnecessary by medical staﬀ, and consider some of the cultural reasons that patients and family members might object to palliative care, concluding with speciﬁc suggestions for the medical team. 1. Introduction Holistic patient care must relate to the spiritual aspect of patients’ experience and concerns. This is especially clear in an area such as the Middle East, where religious beliefs are strong and widespread, but holds true anywhere, since spirituality is a universal part of the human experience [1]. A truly integrative, holistic approach is one that addresses all aspects of the patient experience—the biopsychosocial- spiritual model [2, 3]. Religion and spirituality are important for a majority of our patients, yet their spiritual needs are not supported by the medical team most of the time [4]. The integration of spiritual care into the team approach can pay signiﬁcant dividends, as spiritual care in particular and spiritual wellbeing in general are correlated with higher patient quality of life [4, 5], reduced anxiety [6, 7], reduced end-of-life despair and depression [8, 9], and shorter hospital stays [6, 7]. Even and especially at the end of life, the spiritual dimension is a very signiﬁcant part of the lived experience: “As physical health wanes, spiritual health may increasingly play a central role in determining patient well-being” [4]. Religious struggle, on the other hand, can have a negative impact on well-being or even on mortality [10]. Faith is also signiﬁcant for medical decision making [4, 11]. What role can the medical team play in addressing patient spirituality? Aside from the focused spiritual care provided by the chaplains, all team members have a crucial role to play in engaging patients around this part of their experience of illness. By asking patients directly about their spirituality and religious beliefs, staﬀ better understand patients as a whole person, deepen the caring relationship, build trust, and can potentially uncover spiritual distress or spiritual beliefs that will impact on decision making [12, 13]. McCord et al. found that a large majority of patients wanted staﬀ to discuss spiritual matters with them, and the primary reason for that desire was in order to increase patient- staﬀ understanding [14]. Yet many doctors and nurses feel hesitant to bring up spirituality with patients. One of the factors leading to this reluctance may be unfamiliarity with speciﬁc religions’ beliefs relating to illness, treatment, and death. In Israel, the two predominant religions are Judaism and Islam, both of which are well represented in the rest of