The Rabbi Samuel E. Karff Center for Healthcare Professionals
at the
Institute for Spirituality and Health
Celebrating a Lifetime of Justice, Wisdom, and Care for those in Need of Healing
The Rabbi Samuel E. Karff Center for Healthcare Professionals publicly recognizes the contributions and achievements of a man who not only made a defining and indelible mark at ISH but who contributed a legacy of ideas and teachings that have transformed the spiritual and medical fields. The Karff Center provides students and healthcare professionals with comprehensive resources to support self-care, cultural competency, and the integration of spirituality in clinical settings. The suite of programs offered through the Karff Center continues a 70-year history of programatic excellence at the Institute, which has pioneered work at the interface of spirituality and health.
About Rabbi Samuel E. Karff
Rabbi Samuel E. Karff served for many years as an Emeritus member of the Institute for Spirituality and Health’s Board of Trustees. As a beloved religious leader, he was on the front lines bridging spirituality to medicine by emphasizing the non-biomedical, interpersonal dimensions of health and well-being. Rabbi Karff consistently and authentically articulated an important aspect of ISH’s mission, to strengthen the connection between medicine and spirituality.
Rabbi Karff recognized the fundamental belief that healing is relational. It comes from interactions with others – in the case of a patient, their relationship with a physician, nurse, and other healthcare team members.
Through a course he constructed and later led at the John P. and Kathrine G. McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, Rabbi Karff taught students the critical importance of healing the whole person, not just the disease. He encouraged these current and future healthcare providers to nurture the spirit of the patient, while promoting the importance and necessity of nurturing healthcare providers themselves.
Rabbi Karff endorsed and promoted the Institute for Spirituality and Health’s (ISH’s) longstanding work with medical, nursing and other healthcare students across the entire Texas Medical Center. Work that has been generously funded by grantors such as the Stanford and Joan Alexander Family Fund, the Strake Foundation, and the Jack H. & William M. Light Charitable Trust.
Karff Center Programs and Services Include:
Sacred Sites of Houston: How Faith and Medicine Intersect
Conducted in collaboration with the University of Texas’ McGovern Medical School’s Department of Humanities and Ethics, this course consists of six visits to communities of faith in the Greater Houston area. Over the course of a semester, students can become more aware of how diverse traditions relate religious belief, practice, and community life to health, healing, and the body. We meet with faith leaders and community members to:
understand about basic beliefs, practices, history, and community life (elements of faith);
become informed about tradition-specific views on health, healing, and illness (preferences, restrictions, healing practices, end of life perspectives, prayer, etc.);
learn, if possible, from a member of the community who can discuss their personal experience regarding the relationship between their beliefs and practices and illness; and
UTHealth’s Cizik School of Nursing adopted our Sacred Sites program into a for-credit course that was to be launched in the Fall of 2020, but will be delayed until at least the Fall of 2021, due to the ongoing pandemic.
In the years ISH has managed the program, we have visited more than 25 sites, including Jewish Family Service of Houston, where Linda Burger, CEO, as well as Rabbi Steve Morgen of Congregation Beth Yeshurun, host us. This is one of our most consistent, well-regarded venues, and we often receive excellent feedback from students who are keen to learn that resources like Jewish Family Service exist.
Seminars for Healthcare Professions Students
The Institute for Spirituality and Health provides seminars for students, either on site at ISH, at the students’ home institutions, or now online. The events take the form of an intimate roundtable, a panel, a lecture, a conference, or as an experiential workshop. These offerings are designed to complement and enrich students’ existing curricula.
Annual Physician Assistant Seminar
The Institute for Spirituality and Health provides a 90-minute seminar to Baylor College of Medicine’s Physician Assistant students during their senior, capstone year. Typically, speakers cover the following topics:
● History of spirituality and health;
● Overview of spirituality and health;
● One to two spirituality and health “case studies”; and
● Opportunities for continued engagement with ISH and sample projects;
Occasionally, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, requests that we share a similar seminar with nursing, medical, occupational therapy, and physician assistant students.
The University of Houston College of Medicine
The Institute for Spirituality and Health is a “community placement site,” where interested University of Houston College of Medicine students have the option to complete a project that will enhance their future practice of medicine.
Michael E. DeBakey High School for Health Professions Yoga/Mindfulness Protocol
In 2017, Baylor College of Medicine, ISH and Michael E. DeBakey High School for Health Professions (DBH) partnered to provide educational opportunities focusing on mental health and the benefits of yoga/meditation in reducing stress and improving overall well-being.
During school hours, 40 ninth graders receive yoga/meditation classes for 45 minutes twice a week for 12 weeks. Utilizing self-report rating scales, students in the yoga class reported improvements in attention and a decrease in stress levels in comparison to the students who did not participate in the yoga group.
The results of this collaboration were recently published:
An Evaluation of Yoga and Meditation to Improve Attention, Hyperactivity, and Stress in High-School Students. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (New York, N.Y.), 26(8), 71-707. https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2020.0126
The stress and isolation felt by students during the pandemic inspired the student leader
of their student wellness club to coordinate an extended series of virtual mind-body
skills offerings to students and their families. The eleven-week series was geared to
ameliorating stress and anxiety, as well as building community. It introduced new skills
to participants each week in a safe, supportive virtual atmosphere, with between five
and ten students attending each session.
Spirituality and Nursing Conference
A flagship ISH program, the annual Spirituality and Nursing Conference was founded in 1993 to provide nurses and nursing students across the region a unique educational experience focusing on the religious and spiritual dimensions of care. In 2020, we built stronger relationships with student nursing institutions, including UTHealth’s Cizik School of Nursing, as well as Texas Woman’s University. Student attendance at the 2020 Nursing Conference registered over 80, including students from Texas Woman’s University, Prairie View A&M and Lonestar College Montgomery.
Psychotherapy & Faith Conference
The Psychotherapy & Faith Conference is ISH’s longest running and most distinguished program. Founded in 1992 by Louis Wessendorff and Dr. James Lomax of Baylor College of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry, the Conference has reached thousands of clinicians and mental health practitioners through the years, informing and educating them about various topics within the spirituality and health domain. We welcome student participation and proudly reach between 30-40 future healthcare professionals with the program, providing them enriching content and networking opportunities that they would not otherwise receive. Over the years, young professionals who have a history of attending the Conference are often invited to speak as part of the proceedings. Opportunities like this help to build the next generation of scholar-practitioners who incorporate spirituality and health into their work.
Internships/Practicum
The Institute for Spirituality and Health hosts both undergraduate and graduate students on a rolling basis, providing a venue and network for independent research, self-guided readings, and collaborative projects. Students’ projects, usually lasting one semester, range from how to participate in end-of-life conversations with children to the moral and religious dimensions of disorders of consciousness. We frequently host students from Rice University but have also worked with students from the University of Houston, Baylor College of Medicine, and Saybrook University. By permitting participants to explore topics outside of their regular curriculum as well as interface and network with esteemed leaders in their respective fields, these internships are often a defining feature of the students’ undergraduate education.
Externships
In addition to hosting students for internships and practicum programs, we host “externs” who visit ISH for one or two days in order to shadow a staff member and experience “a day in the life” of a medical non-profit. Some students have gone on to apply for and receive internships.
Conference on Medicine and Religion - Student Papers and Posters
The Conference on Medicine and Religion invites health care practitioners, scholars, religious community leaders, and students to select a particular theme in medicine which relates to religious traditions and practices, particularly, but not exclusively, those of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Conference is a forum for exchanging ideas from an array of disciplinary perspectives ranging from accounts of clinical practices to empirical research to scholarship in the humanities.
The Conference promotes the submission of student-posters and articles for an essay-contest, with the goal of promoting this vital work to our next generation of caregivers and researchers. For many of the students, this is their first opportunity to showcase their work to a significant audience.
Movement and Memory Together – Physical Therapy Students
Beginning in the Fall of 2018, ISH began hosting “Movement and Memory Together” classes for early-stage Alzheimer’s patients and their families. These classes provide practical skills that patients can use to increase mobility and confidence. Protocols were designed by a team of 10 Physical Therapy students from Texas Woman’s University who, along with ISH’s Mind-Body Coach, also taught the classes.
Saybrook University
In the Fall of 2019, we welcomed the first cohort of students from Saybrook University, who are pursuing graduate degrees in Mind-Body Medicine. Saybrook University is a private graduate university in Pasadena, California, which was founded in 1971. It offers postgraduate education with a focus on humanistic psychology and mind-body medicine. It features low residency, master's and doctoral degrees and professional certification programs.
The Institute for Spirituality and Health assists in the recruitment of students from the Texas Medical Center and the surrounding area. Our office venue serves as a satellite campus for Saybrook’s “Residential Conferences,” which are multi-day, intensive, in-person experiences that complement its mostly online curriculum.