Prayer doctor — Physician believes in tapping spiritual resources

"If it's OK," says the doctor, "I'd like to ask God's blessing on your health."

That would be fine, says the patient, so Dr. Brian Zehnder begins. Please bless Don and comfort him, Zehnder says, and bless his family. Zehnder is sitting in a small examining room at the Magna Center for Family Medicine. He has a stethoscope around his neck, and he is holding Don Loveless' hand as he continues his prayer. "I ask that you would supercharge Don's pancreas, so that it would make all the insulin he needs."

Zehnder, an earnest man who likes to use the word "wow!" says he knows this isn't the standard way doctors practice medicine, even doctors who possess what he would describe as "a strong faith." Most of these doctors "compartmentalize," he says; they provide medical care but call in a chaplain when a patient asks for spiritual help. "I know that what we're doing is a little bold," he says.

Two years ago, Zehnder's praying consisted mostly of a prayer at bedtime. But then, he says, he began to see God's presence in his own life and he began reading scientific studies about prayer. Gradually he began asking his patients if he could pray for them. And then with them.

Last month, Zehnder stood in front of a room full of doctors, nurses and other health-care practitioners to explain how he has tried to incorporate spirituality into his clinic. With everything we know now, he told the "Spirituality and Healing in Medicine" conference, it would almost be like committing malpractice not to include prayer in his medical practice.

The commingling of spirituality and medicine has made headlines ("God and Health," on the cover of a recent "Newsweek," for example) and has been the subject of national conferences, including a Harvard Medical School "spirituality and healing" gathering last month that focused on forgiveness. What exactly is meant by "spirituality" is often a bit vague, however, ranging from relaxation techniques to "connectedness" to outright religiosity.

At its most basic (and least threatening), the connection between spirituality and medicine suggests that people get sick for reasons that go beyond germs or genes — a contention that "holistic" medicine practitioners have been saying for decades — and they get well for reasons that don't always rely on pills or the passage of time. Fuzzier elements — relationships and hope, for example — seem to have a bearing on sickness and health. As does church attendance. Science is now trying to tease out cause and effect.