Meaning, purpose and spirituality should be core parts of healthcare, say experts

A new peer-reviewed paper calls for meaning, purpose, and spirituality to be treated as core components of lifestyle medicine - not optional add-ons - because they directly influence patients' ability to adopt and sustain health-promoting behaviors.

The paper, "Meaning, Purpose, and Spirituality in the Clinical Practice of Lifestyle Medicine," emerged from a 2025 national summit convened by the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) in collaboration with the Global Positive Health Institute and funded by the Ardmore Institute of Health. The summit brought together nearly 100 experts to translate decades of research into actionable clinical guidance.

The authors synthesize a growing body of evidence showing that meaning, purpose, and spirituality (MPS) are associated with healthier behaviors, greater psychological resilience, improved well-being, and even lower mortality risk. While national organizations such as the Joint Commission and the American Medical Association have recognized spirituality as an important dimension of care, these elements remain inconsistently addressed in routine clinical practice.

We need to see and value patients as whole people and align care with what matters to them. Whole-person lifestyle medicine works because health is valued by people who have important things to live for. Connecting these dots naturally produces positive change-potentially transformative change. It is how we are wired."

Marc Braman, MD, MPH

The paper outlines practical, scalable strategies for integration, such as tools to capture a brief spiritual history, whole-person frameworks, and team-based workflows that embed MPS into intake, documentation, follow-up visits, and group medical visits. The authors emphasize that conversations should be patient-led, culturally sensitive, and grounded in compassion and trust. Many of these strategies and resources are detailed in the accompanying toolkit for integrating MPS into clinical practice.

Importantly, the paper highlights system-level changes needed to support adoption, including alignment of reimbursement models, development of meaningful metrics, and expanded clinician training in whole-person care. It notes that ACLM's recent broadening of the lifestyle medicine connectedness pillar creates opportunity to begin integrating spirituality within the lifestyle medicine framework.

The article is one of four papers published in a special issue of the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine that collectively examine the evidence base, clinical implementation, education and training, and the implications for clinician well-being of integrating meaning, purpose, and spirituality into health care.

"This special issue comprehensively addresses the value of understanding meaning, purpose, and spirituality on healthcare, in implementing it for better clinical care and clinician well-being, and integrating it into medical education to build the knowledge and skills of future professionals," ACLM Senior Director of Research and Quality Micaela Karlsen, PhD, MSPH, said. "Clinicians don't just want to see their patients survive; they want to see them thrive, and to do that they need to understand all drivers of the individual's health."