Abstract
Patients may feel “lucky” or “unlucky” regarding disease, but questions arise about what they mean. Interviews suggest that US patients often invoke luck in trying to understand why diseases occur and treatments succeed/fail, and do so in the context of religious and spiritual beliefs, struggling with whether luck comes from God; and feeling luck is involved at various points, whether good or bad, regarding the whole or just aspects of an illness, and reflecting personal traits or single events. Social contexts can affect these views. These data have critical implications for researchers, physicians, nurses, chaplains, other providers and patients.
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Lundyn C Davis, Jiseop Kim and especially Patricia Contino for their assistance with the preparation of this manuscript.
Funding
This article draws on research that was supported by the National Institute Health (grant # K08MH001420), the National Human Genome Research Institute (grant #R01 HG02431), and the National Center for Research Resources (grant #UL1 RR024156).
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Klitzman, R. “It wasn’t Luck: God Wants me Here for a Reason”: Perceptions of Luck Among US Patients and Its Relationships to Other Factors Among US Patients. J Relig Health (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-023-01859-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-023-01859-8