Is Medicine a Spiritual Practice?: Job’s Questions and the Work of Healing
June 2026
Hyunjoon Choi
Patients don't just seek answers. They seek meaning.
Modern medicine functions to provide a structured explanatory language for otherwise unorganized human experience of suffering, translating it into biologically grounded diagnostic categories. Through the act of assigning a diagnostic label to the symptoms, biomedical language provides patients with a framework within which their experiences can be understood, predicted, and treated. However this reductionist, cause-and-effect framework produces a relatively closed explanatory structure and hence is limited in capturing patients’ existential questions concerning the meaning of their suffering within the context of their life, as well as how it reshapes their identity and narrative.
In the Book of Job, Job is introduced as a righteous man who nevertheless loses his wealth, children, and health through a series of catastrophic events. In response to his suffering, his three friends come to comfort and console him. Job laments his loss and questions why he was born at all and why he did not die at birth, expressing that death or non-existence would have been preferable to his suffering. Job’s questions are not fundamentally aimed at explaining the causal origin of his suffering, but rather constitute an existential outcry against the absurdity of life itself. However, Job’s friends fail to recognize this dimension and instead attempt to interpret and reduce his suffering within the framework of sin and retributive justice. In the thirteenth chapter, Job argues that he already understands what they claim to know, indicating that his questions do not stem from lack of information. He then rejects explanations offered by his friends and further declares, “You are all physicians of no value,” insisting he wants to argue his case directly before God.
Job’s rebuttal raises the question of whether causal explanation provides a sufficient language for addressing the questions of those who suffer, or whether it prematurely forecloses such inquiry altogether. I wonder, however, if the underlying impulse to resolve or contain suffering through explanation is also found in modern medicine, which through its own reductionist framework, likewise may at times function to reduce the patient’s experience to a biomedical phenomenon without adequately addressing the fundamentally spiritual questions the patient may be raising.
When I argue that medicine is, in a sense, a spiritual practice, I am not suggesting that religion should be handed out like a prescription. Such an approach simply mirrors what Job’s friends did. By spiritual, I do not refer narrowly to religious belief, but to questions of meaning, identity, and one’s place within the broader structure of existence. A central point of the Book of Job is that God does not provide him with a clear explanation for what caused his suffering. Instead, God responds by posing a series of questions, revealing the order of the world which is beyond the scope of what Job can perceive and comprehend. Job experiences healing not through the acquisition of an explanation, but through a transformative encounter with the transcendent, in which his suffering is recontextualized, his questions are reconfigured, and meaning emerges within the context of his relationship with God.
Like Job, patients often raise existential questions that cannot be adequately addressed through biomedical language alone. Those living with chronic physical or mental conditions may experience a profound destabilization of their sense of self. They do not come merely to have their disease explained, but to have their suffering understood. When these distinct needs are conflated, we risk reducing their experience to problems to be solved, thereby becoming what Job calls “miserable comforters.” If the true goal of medicine is the holistic care of those who suffer, then we must resist reducing medical practice to mere technical expertise and instead cultivate relational spaces in which patients can engage their existential and, at times, spiritual questions. It is within this process, through which patients are able to discover the meaning of their suffering, that genuine healing may occur.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hyunjoon Choi is a medical student at the University of Michigan Medical School with a strong interest in psychiatry, particularly the intersection of spirituality and mental health. He is also interested in Korean American mental health and improving access to culturally responsive psychiatric care.
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