CHICAGO - A survey examining religion in medicine found that most U.S. doctors believe in God and an afterlife — a surprising degree of spirituality in a science-based field, researchers say.
In the survey of 1,044 doctors nationwide, 76 percent said they believe in God, 59 percent said they believe in some sort of afterlife, and 55 percent said their religious beliefs influence how they practice medicine.
"We were surprised to find that physicians were as religious as they apparently are," said Dr. Farr Curlin, a researcher at the University of Chicago's MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.
"There's certainly a deep-seated cultural idea that science and religion are at odds," and previous studies have suggested that fewer than half of scientists believe in God, Curlin said Wednesday.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/doctors_and_god