Health Risk Assessment: Examining the Similarities between the Reasoning Exercises of Medical Experts and Islamic Legists
Shaykh Omar Qureshi, PhD(c), Loyola University
Ahsan Arozullah, MPH, MD, Darul Qasim Islamic Institute
Moderator: Aasim Padela, MD, MSc, University of Chicago
Religious values influence the health behaviors of Muslim patients and the clinical practices of Muslim healthcare practitioners in a myriad of ways including the way they conceive of disease and cure to the particular therapeutics they seek and provide. Accordingly, when Muslims deliberate over medicine their concerns are not confined to the impact of medicine upon physical health, but rather their concerns extend to adherence to religious norms and by extension the moral dimensions and potential afterlife ramifications of the use of medicine. In this presentation we aim to shed light upon the moral evaluation of medicine from an Islamic perspective and compare these reasoning exercises to the conventional medical reasoning. Through a panel presentation involving a Muslim clinician and an Islamic jurist we will work though considerations of risk within the clinical realm and Islamic law using a case that involves infectious risk related to the performance of the Hajj. We will define key terms within the reasoning exercises of the medical expert and the legist and illustrate how each expert evaluates evidence within their discipline. Specifically we will outline how each disciplinary expert would define benefit and harm and thereby risk, discuss levels of evidence and considerations of certainty in the respective expert’s deliberations and discuss how the legist employs medical understandings in their reasoning. Furthermore we will comment on the broader issues at the heart of religion and science dialogue such as occasionalism versus causation, and trusting in the Divine versus using worldly means to effect healing, in so far as they relate to the reasoning exercises of the medical expert and the Islamic legist. By clarifying the often unspoken and little understood religious dimensions of biomedicine we hope that medical practitioners can better engage their patients to provide more holistic care that not only attends to the psychosocial and physical aspects of illness and treatment but acknowledges and responds to the religious considerations at play as well.
Ahsan Arozullah, MPH, MD, Darul Qasim Islamic Institute
Moderator: Aasim Padela, MD, MSc, University of Chicago
Religious values influence the health behaviors of Muslim patients and the clinical practices of Muslim healthcare practitioners in a myriad of ways including the way they conceive of disease and cure to the particular therapeutics they seek and provide. Accordingly, when Muslims deliberate over medicine their concerns are not confined to the impact of medicine upon physical health, but rather their concerns extend to adherence to religious norms and by extension the moral dimensions and potential afterlife ramifications of the use of medicine. In this presentation we aim to shed light upon the moral evaluation of medicine from an Islamic perspective and compare these reasoning exercises to the conventional medical reasoning. Through a panel presentation involving a Muslim clinician and an Islamic jurist we will work though considerations of risk within the clinical realm and Islamic law using a case that involves infectious risk related to the performance of the Hajj. We will define key terms within the reasoning exercises of the medical expert and the legist and illustrate how each expert evaluates evidence within their discipline. Specifically we will outline how each disciplinary expert would define benefit and harm and thereby risk, discuss levels of evidence and considerations of certainty in the respective expert’s deliberations and discuss how the legist employs medical understandings in their reasoning. Furthermore we will comment on the broader issues at the heart of religion and science dialogue such as occasionalism versus causation, and trusting in the Divine versus using worldly means to effect healing, in so far as they relate to the reasoning exercises of the medical expert and the Islamic legist. By clarifying the often unspoken and little understood religious dimensions of biomedicine we hope that medical practitioners can better engage their patients to provide more holistic care that not only attends to the psychosocial and physical aspects of illness and treatment but acknowledges and responds to the religious considerations at play as well.