Praying with Patients

In a cramped curriculum of medical education, there is hardly enough room for anything not directly related to learning how the human body works and fails. Yet on occasion, I find us students, exasperated from discussions of arcana and enigma of diseases and dodging academic curve balls ceaselessly thrown at us by well-wishing faculty, pleasantly distracted and wondering in and through the matters of spiritual province.

One of the dilemmas crisscrossing the canvas of patient-doctor relationship is that of praying with patients. Should a physician fend off the patient's request and choose to distance with references to own precepts that do not allow him or her to join in with a plea that may be as meaningful as a medicine. Would professional boundaries of an encounter be overstepped? Is praying a private personal matter, or private to a relationship, just like the matters of sexuality, psychiatric, or legal concerns?

While the modern medicine segregates theology and science on the basis that the latter affords practical packages of knowledge that at hands of its practitioners often translate into objective improvement of organic health, Hippocrates, Maimonides, and Rene Laennec (inventor of stethoscope and a devout Catholic) practiced at God's behest and will, as messengers and deputies of God. Certainly, the environment these forebears lived and practiced was less secular than ours, but practitioners of medicine of the past and religious figures of the community -- rabbi, imams, and priests, have frequently embodied the same person

So what should a modern physician do? Does the white coat confer an obligation to evaluate every action from the perspective of the benefit to the patient? Or, citing atheistic viewpoint, refuse? Or launch into a discussion whether praying actually confers any health benefit. The conflict arises for physicians when the role of a sensitive human being conflicts with the boundaries of a medical persona. Sometimes these boundaries are too rigid and a physician should enact the role of the caring human even if it may feel uncomfortable or embarrassing not to maintain the professional veneer. On the other hand, the boundaries could protect both patients and physicians. May be we are asking a wrong question? Rather than to look at a prayer as a treatment of material afflictions, perhaps a better question would be whether a prayer can positively affect emotional state of mind. And if you don’t like the word prayer, substitute it with meditation.

Perhaps, there is no good single answer for everybody. But I will pray to have wisdom to find one for myself.