Background: Prayer is an important part of many patients' and physicians' lives. There is little data in the literature regarding patients' perception of prayer from or with their doctors.
Objective: To assess in a masked fashion patients' impression of prayer's role in a medical setting, and their perception of being offered and receiving prayer from their physician.
Design, setting, and participants: Confidential survey of 567 consecutive patients who were offered prayer by their physician before elective eye surgery.
Main outcome measures: Proportion of patients favoring physician-initiated prayer and weighted Likert responses to various positive and negative sentiments regarding their experience.
Results: Survey response rate was 53% (300 patients). Ninety-six percent of patients identified themselves as Christian. At least 90% of Christian patients responded favorably toward their prayer experience to each Likert question. Among the non-Christian patients, the proportion of negative impressions to the prayer experience ranged from 0 to 25%.
Conclusions: Physician-initiated Christian-based prayer before surgery is well-received by a strong majority of Christian patients. Although the data are few, only a minority of non-Christians felt negatively regarding this experience.