Healing and Prayer, part 4

Prayer in the Workplace

As a physician who promotes healing on a daily basis, I am in­trigued with the idea of incorporating prayer into my medical practice. Be­lieving as I do, I have to incorporate prayer into my practice to be consistent with my values. I must pray for and with my patients. I understand that patients come to me as a physician first and foremost, yet I can’t ignore my calling to be a witness for Christ. If I ignored that testimony, would it be tanta­mount to spiritual malpractice? …I hope no attorneys are paying attention…. This is an area of great controversy and debate in the medical profession. I agree with some critics that proselytizing in the office may not be appropriate given the dynamics of the doctor patient relationship; however, since a patient’s spiritual beliefs may impact their health, it is imperative and appropriate for me to understand and inquire about those beliefs. Taking a spiritual history is often equally as important as the physical exam. Understand that my role as a physician is not limited to Christian patients. I have a virtual smorgasbord of religions practiced by patients I care for. Their religious practices impact their health just as much as a Christian’s beliefs impact theirs.

This understanding has been a transformational journey for me. For years it was if I would walk into my office and put God on the coat rack and then pick Him up again at the end of the day. I was living on two parallel tracks, my job and my religion, and each was aware of the other, yet they never seemed to interact. Many of you may be living this same dichotomy. The dissonance eventually forced me to find some way of merging the secular and the spiritual. If I was to be consistent to both the science and the faith, I had to successfully integrate the two without compromising either. In order to merge these seemingly divergent beliefs into a lifestyle, I began to ask questions.

Are prayer and science compatible? Can they coexist or are they mutually exclusive? Can prayer be tested? What is the evidence that prayer is effective? Is this an issue solely of faith, or can science demonstrate its effectiveness?

If I lived in the Inquisition, some church elders would be collecting the lighter fluid and marshmallows because they would burn me at the stake for asking such heretical questions. But these and other ques­tions must be carefully and thoughtfully addressed before an integration of science and faith can be accomplished. The God of the universe is not threatened or intimidated by questions; He encourages them, because the answers you seek are based in truth. All truth is of God, so if we seek the truth …and that is the goal of science…, we are seeking to better know God. We know by faith that prayer heals. Is this to be left to the realm of the mystic, or are we to utilize God-given techniques to bolster our faith?