Every January my clinic schedule fills up with patients who, in keeping with their New Year’s resolutions, want to lose weight, drink less alcohol, and stop smoking. In my first few years of practice, I felt obligated to give each of these patients a 20 minute lecture on their vice of choice, replete...

A few years ago I ran the medical clinic at a camp in the Pocono Mountains.  Local churches donated scholarship money, and the funds were used to bus kids from Philadelphia, Trenton, and New York City to the mountains for a week in the great outdoors. The summer was as much a learning experience for...

MSNBC.COM cites two recent studies that confirms the link between spirituality and happiness in pre-teens. Interestingly, the researches made strong lines of deliniation between religion and spirituality. Religion, they write, is an institutionalized expression of spirituality. Spirituality gets defined...