BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Have you ever had the feeling that your doctor doesn't have enough time for you, or, if you're a doctor, that you are under so much pressure it's hard to be compassionate with your patients? There is a physician in Northern California who thinks medicine is losing its soul, and she's trying to rescue it. Rachel Remen is a best-selling author, a popular speaker, and herself a lifelong patient. Kim Lawton reports.

KIM LAWTON: Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen is leading a national campaign to rediscover the practice of medicine as a spiritual endeavor.

Dr. RACHEL NAOMI REMEN (Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine and Founder and Director, Institute for the Study of Health and Illness): Medicine for many, many people isn't a job. It's a way of life. And it's a way of life that's characterized by certain very traditional values -- values like compassion and service and reverence for life. These are not the values of science. These are the values of what might be called a spiritual path.

LAWTON: That means helping other doctors transform how they view their profession.

Dr. REMEN (In Meeting): I was taught to cure people, and what that meant was that my relationship with my patients basically was a relationship between me as an expert and my patient as a problem.

LAWTON: Oncologist Jennifer Lucas says she's become a better doctor by following Remen's advice and ignoring something they both learned in med school: that in order to maintain professionalism, they should keep an objective distance from their patients.

Dr. JENNIFER LUCAS (Oncologist): There's this big line that you are not supposed to cross. But people are really looking for ways to connect with you as their physician and to make you human.

LAWTON: Lucas tries to build relationships with her patients by bringing in values such as compassion and empathy -- values, she says, that motivated her to become a doctor in the first place.

Dr. LUCAS: I've cried with a patient on many occasions. I will share my sadness if something is going on that is particularly difficult for everybody. It's good for me, it's good for the patient, it's good for their families, and they have a sense that, you know, they are really being cared for.

ROSEMARY GUDELJ (Patient): I didn't expect to have a doctor like her, because it was a serious illness, and she gave me so much reassurance and love from the very beginning.

LAWTON: Dr. Remen believes the medical profession is suffering a severe spiritual crisis. She says the economic pressures of modern medicine, such as the growing influence of insurance companies and a focus on the bottom line, are all taking an overwhelming toll on physicians.

Dr. REMEN: If you are seeing 25 to 40 people a day, there's very little you can do in the way of connecting to people. And these people are hurting. These are people who are frightened. They need so much more than a prescription. And they go by you in this unending line, you know, seven minutes at a time. It does something to someone to have to face that day after day.

LAWTON: What it does, she says, is generate cynicism and burnout.

Dr. REMEN: What happens is you begin to live below your own level of excellence. If you do that long enough, something begins to die in you, and that something is the soul of your profession.

LAWTON: As director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness, Remen encourages doctors to reclaim the soul of medicine. The institute sponsors a project called Finding Meaning in Medicine. Doctors from diverse religious traditions, including some with no religious affiliation, gather once a month in small groups to discuss a chosen theme.

Dr. REMEN: The topic is one of the basic values of medicine. It might be something like compassion, or it might be listening, or it might be grace. And the price of admission to this little meeting is that you bring a story from your professional work as a physician about the topic of the evening.