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In this episode, we speak with G. Scott Morris, a physician and ordained minister who has dedicated his career to treating patients with chronic conditions at Church Health. He shares his experiences working with individuals to improve their health through better nutrition and physical activity, and discusses the potential for these lifestyle changes to prevent and manage chronic conditions. Join us as we explore how people of faith can take an active role in addressing the challenges of our broken health system and improving health outcomes for all.

G. Scott Morris is a physician and ordained minister.

He shares his story and discusses his book, Care: How People of Faith Can Respond to Our Broken Health System.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Rate and review at KevinMD.com/rate. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today on the show we have Scott Morris. He’s a physician and an ordained minister. He’s the author of the book Care: How People of Faith Can Respond to Our Broken Health System. Scott, welcome to the show.

G. Scott Morris: Glad to be here, Kevin. Thank you.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your book in a little bit, but first off, just briefly share your story and journey to where you are today.

G. Scott Morris: Yeah, so I’m located in Memphis, Tennessee. I’m a United Methodist minister as well as a family practice physician. I spend most of my time playing doctor, but I sort of think of myself as a pastor. I’m the CEO of something called Church Health here in Memphis.

So we provide health care for the people who work to make our lives comfortable. They cook our food, take care of our children, wash our clothes, and will one day dig our graves. They don’t complain. We care for about 80,000 people. We’re the largest faith-based, privately funded health center in America. There are a lot of disclaimers there, but we operate out of a building that was once a Sears distribution center. It’s a little larger than the Empire State Building. We have 20 providers. We have a thousand doctors who volunteer with us, which is a small miracle.

Kevin Pho: So I’ve interviewed close to a thousand physicians on the show, and I think you’re the first who’s both a physician and an ordained minister. So can you give some examples of that intersection between your two hats, being an ordained minister and a physician? Give some stories about how those intersect.

G. Scott Morris: Sure. Well, it starts with our view of health. Being healthy is not about the absence of disease, and the World Health Organization would agree with that. Who cares if you live two years longer if it means two years longer in a nursing home? Life for life’s sake can’t possibly be the point. So what we believe being healthy is about is ultimately three things: having more joy in your life, having more love in your life, and being driven closer to things greater than we are. Now, we would call that God. You don’t have to call that God, but there are things for all of us that are greater than we are.

But if that is what it takes to be healthy, more joy, more love, being driven closer to God, it actually doesn’t have a lot to do with the doctor, which led us to create something we call the Model for Healthy Living. This is just a riff on the social determinants, but we would argue that there are seven things in life that are equally important to life that must be in balance if you’re going to be healthy. Medical care is one, but only one. Then there’s nutrition, movement, emotions, family and friends, work, and lastly your faith life. We actually think your faith life is as important as anything the doctor might do.

It’s been shown over and over again that patients want to talk about issues of faith with their doctor, but doctors are just not prepared to do it. So we don’t exist to impose our faith on patients, but within our residency we teach our young doctors: How do you actually engage people around the spiritual dimension to life? Because for the most part, 50 percent of who we are has everything to do with matters of the spirit and not things that our traditional medical system knows how to care for.

Kevin Pho: So go into more detail about faith in the doctor-patient relationship. When people ask you that question, how do you respond?

G. Scott Morris: Well, it’s not so much even our interjecting faith. I mean, here in Memphis, taking care of poor people for all these years, in America we oftentimes consider a person’s economic status to be a measure of their capital. But our patients don’t have any capital. I would walk in, and I’ll ask the question every day. I’ve just been seeing patients up until talking to you, and I walk in and I’ll ask, “How are you doing?” And the answer I invariably get is, “I am fine and blessed.” Really? You’re fine and blessed? You have nothing. But what they do have is an abundance of spiritual capital.

So in my own practice, I walk in, and the first thing I do is try to make sure that medically I am not messing up. And then I get to spend the rest of the encounter with that patient asking the question, “How do I get to be fine and blessed? What do you know about life that I need to know?” This is just an example of how the spiritual dimension plays in.

Other pieces of that: I saw a patient recently. It’s a long story, but she was working undocumented, cleaning houses, and she ends up getting raped by other workers in the home. She doesn’t go to the doctor because she’s undocumented. She comes to see me because of pain in her pelvis, only her pelvic exam is normal, because that’s not the problem. The problem is that they had totally crushed her heart, and my giving her an extra 15 minutes of my great wisdom wasn’t going to solve anything. But what I was able to do is bring in one of our Spanish-speaking counselors, which we have embedded in everything we do, who was able to spend an hour with her in the exam room as I kept moving, doing the thing that a physician would be more likely to actually add substance to.

Kevin Pho: All right. You’re also the author of the book Care: How People of Faith Can Respond to Our Broken Health System. So before talking about the book itself, how did it come together?

G. Scott Morris: It’s really a reflection of the work we’ve been doing in Memphis for 35 years. But the fact of the matter is that there are free and charitable clinics all over this country that are supported by the faith community that completely fly under the radar. There are roughly 1,400 federally qualified health centers in America, but there are also 1,400 free and charitable clinics run by faith-based organizations in this country, and they care for almost the exact same number of patients. The big difference is the free and charitable clinics do have paid staff, as do we, but there are over a hundred thousand physicians in America volunteering their time to care for people who have nowhere else to turn. The free and charitable clinics actually save emergency rooms over $10 billion a year, and yet nobody seems to know that they even exist.

So this book is about trying to tell that story, about the fact that they’re out there, but also how they are making a huge difference, and if we were to actually spend more time supporting them, we could have better health outcomes in America.

Kevin Pho: So you mentioned that not a lot of people, or not enough people, know about these organizations. Why is that?

G. Scott Morris: You know, that’s a really good question. I ultimately blame Descartes. Descartes convinced us that we can take a human being and separate us into a body and a spirit. We put the body on the one side and say it’s the purview of science and medicine. We put the spirit on the other and say it’s OK for people of faith to mess around with your spirit, but they should not cross this line and care about our bodies.

So that idea is a fundamentally flawed concept, but what it leads to is that when people of faith get involved in issues of health and health care, there is a pushback on that, and the medical community just assumes that it can’t be real medicine. But the reality is, in caring for that spiritual dimension to life along with caring for the physical components, you actually end up with better health outcomes.

Kevin Pho: So you mentioned there’s a pushback when people mention that intersection between faith and medicine. What’s an example or story of that?

G. Scott Morris: Well, I mean, as we speak, there are people in the emergency room right now complaining of pain in their heart. And what will happen in that emergency room is the patient will have an EKG. They will get a CT scan. They may get an MRI. They may end up getting a heart catheterization. And the doctor is going to come back and say, “There’s nothing wrong.” Because the problem is that you can MRI somebody’s chest all day long and you will never know what a broken heart looks like, and we don’t have any pills for broken hearts. This is one of the many ways the system is broken, because we don’t have the ability to actually recognize the spiritual dimension to life in the traditional health care system.

Kevin Pho: Now, for those clinicians or health care workers who want to be more involved in faith-based health care organizations, what are some ways that they can go about doing that?

G. Scott Morris: Yes. So there is actually an organization called the National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics, and I guarantee you, wherever you are, there’s one close to you that you can learn more about. Church Health actually runs an organization called ECHO, which stands for Empowering Church Health Opportunities, where we have spawned almost 100 clinics around the country to get open and running. We run a program a few times a year where we invite people to Memphis to spend a couple of days here to learn how Church Health works. And if you just want to know more about us, just go to our website, which is churchhealth.org.

Kevin Pho: What are some of the other main messages that you want clinicians to come away with after reading your book?

G. Scott Morris: So look, the fact of the matter is that we all have a need to be engaged in caring for people in this holistic way of seeing patients. America has created a health care system that is overly dependent on technology and drugs. We’ve come to believe that we can live our lives any way we want to, and when we’re broken, the doctor can use that technology to fix us. Well, surely you understand, as well as I do, and most of your physician listeners do, that the technology is actually not that good and the doctor is not that smart. God gave us this body for a reason, and we have an obligation to take care of it.

So we need to find a way to engage other providers that are not just pushers of pills, because we have to remember that all pills are poisons. That is how they work. Now, I am a statin-prescribing physician, but these pills interfere with the body the way God created it, the body doing what it is naturally trying to do. You’ve got to be pretty doggone smart to override the body the way God created it. Thank God the pills don’t work very well. If they did everything they tell us they would do on TV, we’d be killing people right and left.

So it’s about finding other ways of caring for people, beyond just through chemistry. The fact of the matter is our body is probably more an electrical system than it is a chemical system. If your lights are flickering, why would you call the plumber to fix it? Yet we believe that you can give chemical solutions to things that are fundamentally of an electrical nature. I think it’s a great example of how our understanding of the body is so terribly limited. And so we should be open to realizing that there are other things beyond what our medical-industrial complex pushes that actually, ultimately, lead to better health outcomes.

Kevin Pho: So you mentioned that you’re a family physician. If you’re in the exam room with a patient, what kind of questions can other primary care doctors ask patients to address their spiritual needs?

G. Scott Morris: You just need to start to ask the patient: What brings you joy? Where do you get strength in life? That’s as opposed to just imposing the physician’s point of view, where you’re just, “I’m looking at your blood pressure,” doing these mechanistic ways of seeing that person without realizing that being a whole human being is more than just the things we can measure. So it’s getting the patient’s input to understand how their life is going, where they feel like they’re strong, and where they need support, and asking specifically, “How has your spirit felt and strengthened?” As a Methodist, John Wesley used to ask the question, “How is it with your soul?” It’s not a bad question for doctors to address as well.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Scott Morris. He’s a family physician and an ordained minister. His book is titled Care: How People of Faith Can Respond to Our Broken Health System. Scott, what are some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

G. Scott Morris: Well, first off, that we are both body and spirit. From a strictly biblical perspective, we are dust and breath, and really, on both sides of the aisle, we have failed to understand that. In our churches and our faith communities, we have blessed the sin of gluttony for the sake of fellowship. The least healthy meal you could eat every week is actually at a church. In the midst of the obesity epidemic in America, clergy are 20 percent heavier than the rest of the population. You can’t have healthy faith communities if you don’t have healthy leaders.

So my most important message, I think, is to realize that the concept of being body and spirit is who we are naturally, and that we need to overcome this Cartesian, dualistic way, which is just a recapitulation of Plato, that philosophically actually rules the world. So to start with, see that we are body and spirit, and then think creatively about how you live into that. And from a physician standpoint, you have to completely jettison the concept of Dr. God. We have our dietitians, health coaches, and counselors embedded in everything we do. We find ways to be engaged with the faith community around us, and to realize that the faith community is a great sleeping giant to improve health outcomes in America. It is not just dependent on people who wear white coats. Being healthy has to be focused on things that include nutrition, movement, and the spiritual dimension of life.

Kevin Pho: Scott, thank you so much for sharing your time and insight. Thanks again for being on the show.

G. Scott Morris: Appreciate the opportunity.