There is a topic that has been avoided since the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment in medical discourse. Nothing to do with diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment protocols, but about the invisible human nature that holds patients together when science runs out of answers. That conversation is about faith.

I personally did not have it for a long time. For most of my thirty-five years in medicine, I kept faith neatly compartmentalized, something that strictly belonged in church and perhaps family dinners, not in exam rooms or on hospital whiteboards. My father was a physician and a practicing Catholic. My family was devout. And yet, faith was a private matter. Religious privacy was handled with sacred decorum. You believed, but you did not say so out loud, particularly not in a professional setting.

Medicine, after all, is supposed to be evidence-based. Rational. Reproducible. And so, like many physicians trained in that tradition, I drifted, slowly, almost imperceptibly, away from the faith of my childhood. This distancing was not a conscious anger or rebellion. Simply the result of a quiet erosion that comes from decades of long hours, clinical thinking, and a professional culture that treats the spiritual as, at best, ancillary.

Then in 2018, I went to Jerusalem. I had started wrestling with existential questions, and I happened upon an evangelical group online that offered a trip to the Holy Land. I joined their pilgrimage, somewhat impulsively. What struck me immediately was how different they were from what I experienced during my Catholic upbringing. I had grown up in a faith tradition that was deeply sincere but largely interior, belief was lived quietly, kept close, expressed in Mass and in private prayer. These evangelicals were something else entirely. They spoke of their faith out loud, to anyone, without apology or self-consciousness. On street corners, over meals, in conversation with strangers. They were not embarrassed by their beliefs. They assumed it was worth sharing. That contrast unsettled me in a way I did not expect. I had never thought of my own restraint as a limitation. Watching them, I began to wonder if it was.

What I expected from Jerusalem was history: stone walls, ancient markets, a tourist’s version of the sacred. What I received was something I cannot fully explain in clinical language, and I have stopped trying. Something shifted. Not in my theology, exactly, but in my willingness to be seen. To be known as a man who believes. The private faith my family had modeled suddenly felt insufficient, not because it was wrong, but because I was being called to more.

I came home and did something that genuinely frightened me. I put up posters in my office. Photographs of myself, with my prayers printed on them. Not generic “healing thoughts” decor, but real prayers, specific and personal, visible to every patient who walked through my door.

The fear was immediate and concrete. I practice interventional physiatry in Clearwater, Florida, treating spine pain, osteoarthritis, and chronic suffering. My patients came to me for science, for injections, regenerative medicine, and evidence-based rehabilitation. What would they think of a physician who prayed? Would I seem unprofessional? Would they leave? In medicine, we are trained to anticipate complications. This felt like one.

What happened instead was unexpected. Patients began asking about the posters. Not with discomfort, but with curiosity, then with gratitude. They asked for copies. The requests multiplied until I assembled a small prayer booklet and distributed it for free. I have now given away more than one thousand copies. One thousand patients, people living with chronic pain, navigating surgeries, facing diagnoses that terrified them, who asked for something beyond the prescription pad. They were not embarrassed to want it. I had been the only one embarrassed. I did not push this. I simply openly displayed what I stood for beyond the confines of clinical practice. I placed my beliefs bare and, if asked, was willing to talk about them.

Research confirms what my waiting room had been quietly telling me. Studies suggest that over half of Americans want their doctors to address spiritual aspects of their overall health care. For many patients, faith-based connection fosters a stronger relationship with their physician and provides comfort in the face of chronic disease and chronic pain. I had known this in the abstract. Now I experienced it in my waiting room.

But the story that truly made me reflect belongs to someone else. A physician I trained with, a brilliant cardiologist, a man with an established practice and thousands of loyal patients, made a decision that, when I heard about it, startled me. He began praying with his patients. Not as an adjunct to care, not as a quiet moment before the consultation. As a central act of his practice.

The colleague who told me about it looked genuinely worried. The kind of worry you see when someone thinks a person has lost their footing professionally, perhaps even their mind. He described it carefully, the way physicians do when they are trying to be fair about something they do not fully understand. What I heard underneath the clinical neutrality was alarm. I shared it. My first reaction was professional: His career is over. We are trained to believe that medicine and ministry do not mix, that patients come for stethoscopes, not scripture, and that blurring that line courts both liability and ridicule. I worried for him.

His patients stayed. New patients came.

I sat with that fact for a long time. What does it mean that a cardiologist in Puerto Rico who began praying openly with his patients did not lose his practice, but grew it? What are patients telling us with that response, if we are willing to hear it?

The questions underlying the experience of illness are profound ones. As one prominent voice in bioethics has put it, separating personal and professional values in medicine is “a lazy way of ignoring the most important questions underlying the experience of illness”: What are we as human beings? How do we flourish? Why do we get sick? What should we hope for in the face of our sickness? These are questions that religious and spiritual traditions have much to say about. Medicine has sometimes acted as though these questions were outside our jurisdiction. Patients have quietly disagreed.

I am not suggesting that every physician must pray with their patients, or that clinical rigor should yield to devotion. The evidence-based practice I have built over thirty-five years remains the foundation of everything I do. Regenerative medicine does not work on faith alone. Neither does a well-placed epidural.

But I am suggesting that we have been wrong, or at least incomplete, in our inherited assumption that faith belongs outside the exam room. That the physician who prays is somehow less scientific. The patient who wants to be seen as a spiritual being as well as a biological one is asking for something that medicine cannot or should not provide.

What Jerusalem gave me was not a new set of beliefs. It permitted me to stop hiding the ones I already had. And what my patients gave me, in return, was something I did not expect: relief. They were relieved. As if they had been waiting for their doctor to acknowledge what they had known all along, that healing is larger than any of us, that suffering asks questions science cannot always answer, and that sometimes, what a person needs alongside their diagnosis is the courage of their physician to say: I believe in something greater than this moment too.

Spirituality and medicine converge at a common root: a sense of purpose. That is as true for physicians as it is for patients. I drifted from my faith during the years I was most technically proficient. That may not be a coincidence. The clinical precision that medicine demands can, if we are not careful, quietly crowd out the very humanity that drew us to it in the first place.

My father never spoke publicly about his faith. He was a good doctor and a good man. I understand now that he was also a product of his time, a time when keeping these worlds separate seemed like the professional thing to do.

That separation is not needed and could be preventing new avenues of healing. The patients are telling us so. One prayer booklet at a time.

Francisco M. Torres is an interventional physiatrist specializing in diagnosing and treating patients with spine-related pain syndromes. He is certified by the American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and the American Board of Pain Medicine and can be reached at Florida Spine Institute and Wellness. 

Dr. Torres was born in Spain and grew up in Puerto Rico. He graduated from the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine. Dr. Torres performed his physical medicine and rehabilitation residency at the Veterans Administration Hospital in San Juan before completing a musculoskeletal fellowship at Louisiana State University Medical Center in New Orleans. He served three years as a clinical instructor of medicine and assistant professor at LSU before joining Florida Spine Institute in Clearwater, Florida, where he is the medical director of the Wellness Program.

Dr. Torres is an interventional physiatrist specializing in diagnosing and treating patients with spine-related pain syndromes. He is certified by the American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and the American Board of Pain Medicine. He is a prolific writer and primarily interested in preventative medicine. He works with all of his patients to promote overall wellness.