April 27, 2025 Essay: Doctor, Will You Pray for Me?: Medicine, Chaplains and Healing the Whole Person
As a medical intern, I once treated a young woman with metastatic breast cancer. Every morning, her sparkling blue eyes looked up at me with hope. I did as much as possible for her medically, but unfortunately, her cancer spread further. She developed ongoing fevers and nausea, and soon rarely glanced at me when I entered her room. Most days, she lay on her side, fatigued, her face turned to the wall.
She was Catholic, and one day, I noticed that a priest had started visiting her. A week later, when I entered the room, she looked up at me again and smiled. I sensed that she felt a renewed connection to something beyond her.
Sadly, she died a month later, but had seemed far less despondent. Her priest had offered her something that I could not.
Patients with serious disease and their families commonly feel fear and despair and come to value spiritual and religious beliefs. Seventy-two percent of Americans believe in the power of prayer. Attendance at religious services has also been associated with lower risk of death, suicide, and substance abuse, and less depression.
Yet hospitalized patients and their families often are unable to attend their houses of worship or don’t have one. Chaplains thus fill crucial gaps. As the religious makeup of the U.S. has changed in recent years, their profession has begun to do so, too. Board-certified chaplains are now increasingly trained to help patients of diverse beliefs. To learn what they do, I recently conducted an in-depth study, speaking with 50 chaplains from across the country and from different faiths, and wrote a book, Doctor, Will You Pray for Me?: Medicine, Chaplains and Healing the Whole Person, presenting the extraordinary inspiration and insights I found.
One chaplain, for instance, told me about a despondent patient who was dying and felt that his life was not worth living and that he was a burden to others. The chaplain picked up a piece of bread from the patient’s meal tray and said,
“Bread is really amazing, isn’t it? Just to enjoy the taste of a piece of bread! Maybe life is not meant to be lived according to external accomplishments. What if it’s okay just to enjoy the days you have?” The patient brightened and felt a renewed sense of meaning.
Often, chaplains are the only staff with time to talk to patients, whom they can therefore get to know well. Every night at 2 a.m., one patient phoned the on-call nurse, complaining of pain. The staff tried altering his medicine without success. Finally, a chaplain spoke to the patient, who turned out to be carrying significant guilt from his mother’s suicide when he was 18. When the chaplain arranged for the man’s elder siblings to talk about it, they were “aghast,” the chaplain told me. “They reminded him that their mother had mental health issues: ‘Don’t you remember?’ It was like a 50-pound weight had been lifted. After that, he never again called the nurses at night.”
Chaplains also serve as critical mediators in conflicts among patients, families and physicians. At another hospital, a teenager who was dying wanted to donate his organs. Soon he was brain dead and on life support, which surgeons planned to remove in the operating room. The boy’s family wanted to be present when he died, but the surgeons refused for fear that they’d disrupt the procedure.
Presented with an impasse, a chaplain negotiated a solution: The family would dress in sterile gowns and stay in the theater for three minutes. The family and physicians sang “Amazing Grace,” the boy’s favorite song. When he died, the mother said to the chaplain: “Thank you for that gift. . .. We got to sing my son into heaven.”
To countless families and patients, chaplains, I saw, offer invaluable gifts.
– Robert Klitzman, MD