A mixed crowd of students and professors gathered for the Medical and Religion seminar given by CSUB professor Christopher Meyers in the Fireside Room on Feb. 11.

Jack Hernandez, director of the Levan Institute, introduced him in the opening speech.

Basically the seminar went into the philosophical reasoning of surrogates making medical decisions for the patient.

“Philosophy is a bunch of egghead mush,” said Hernandez in the introduction.

When Meyers got up to speak, he reassured everyone that he would keep it short and sweet since most people in the room did not have a background in philosophy.

Meyers explained that a surrogate is a person who speaks for a patient during medical decisions when he or she is not able to.

After Meyers stated that he was going to cut back on the philosophy, he moved on to ethics. He pondered this question: Is it ethically okay to put the religious beliefs of the surrogate ahead of the patient’s interests?

“Religious beliefs are profoundly special in the clinic,” said Meyers.

In many observed cases, some patients’ surrogates believed that God would intervene.

In the seminar, Meyers talks about how clinicians have a very hard time wanting to challenge religious beliefs.

“It creates a significant harm to the patient sometimes,” said Meyers.

Meyers talked about two specific cases that he and Stewart Eskew looked at for “The Journal of Clinical Ethics.”

One basically talked about how, due to religious beliefs, a woman suffered and died because medical authorities were not allowed to use pain medication. The other one talked about a woman who died because she didn’t want a blood transfusion due to her religious beliefs.

The basic question of the whole lecture was this: Should one choose biological reasoning or religious reasoning?

There is no definite answer to this question, Meyers said.