Having practiced medicine for four decades, Dr. Marc Siegel knows the healing power of faith.
Indeed, the Fox News senior medical analyst has always had miracles on his mind. They’ve been everywhere — from his fateful on-the-job meeting of his neurologist wife, Luda Bronfin, to the birth of his miracle son, Samuel, who overcame health obstacles as a newborn, to his experience with the sudden and inexplicable mobility of wheelchair-bound patients.
As his personal faith expressed itself throughout his own life, it naturally did the same in his medical career.
“God would manifest throughout my practice, but not in ways that alter the science. That’s the thing people get wrong,” Siegel told The Post, noting skeptics of tying science and spirituality. “I believe in combining the two and thinking about trying to preserve the preciousness of life.”
That meditation — on the mingling of modern medicine and miracles — led the practicing internist to embark on the greatest journey of his career.
“God would manifest throughout my practice, but not in ways that alter the science,” Dr. Marc Siegel says. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post
In writing his new book, “The Miracles Among Us: How God’s Grace Plays a Role in Healing,” the NYU Langone Health clinical professor of medicine discovered how powerful science can be when it intersects with the supernatural.
The tome, which chronicles harrowing and hopeful stories of real people going through extraordinary medical challenges, is an inspiring testament to life’s mysteries.
“I believe in the miracle lane,” said Siegel, “where science and medicine are combined.”
Each chapter is brimming with uplifting tales of people, both high profile and not, demonstrating uncommon resilience not in spite of but because of a medical crisis.
Fox News anchor Bret Baier and his wife Amy were thrown curveball after curveball as their 18-year-old son Paul battled complex congenital heart disease, which included 10 angioplasties and four open-heart surgeries by the time he was 16.
Along with his parents, the strapping 6-foot teen faced every test with a rare fortitude.
But in 2024 an “extra-cautious” doctor ordered a chest X-ray for Paul during a standard visit that turned up a “golf-ball sized” aneurysm just off the heart that could burst any moment.
After Paul’s fifth — and successful — open-heart surgery, Amy saw the sequence of events as an act of divine intervention.
“You just saved my son’s life, because had you not done that lung X- ray, chances are he wouldn’t have made it,” the grateful mom told that physician. “Great doctors like this are the hands of God,” Amy said. “They’re changing lives.”
Sometimes the miracle is the doctor following his intuition and ordering the extra test.
Fox News anchor Bret Baier and his wife watched “the hands of God” in action on their son Paul.
In another chapter, the late Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, foresaw the lifesaving heart diagnosis of his carpenter’s infant son, Israel, when local doctors told the concerned parents he’d outgrow the lethargy and sweating.
Considered the messiah by some, the Rebbe insisted on open-heart surgery while Israel’s stunned doctors bristled that it would be far too dangerous for the 7-month-old, back in 1989.
But when the baby suffered sudden cardiac arrest and nearly died, Mount Sinai Hospital’s medical team was convinced by the Rebbe’s pronouncement and successfully performed the surgery by closing Israel’s patent ductus and opening the aortic valve.
Pediatric cardiologist Dr. Richard Golinko wasn’t a religious man, but the Rebbe made him believe in miracles, Israel, now a healthy man in his 30s, told Siegel.
“There is no disconnect between religion and spirituality and modern medicine. The Rebbe wanted us to go through modern medicine and through nature at the same time,” Israel added. “See a miracle. Be guided by it. The Rebbe saved my life.”
These remarkable stories — some religious, some secular — are knitted together by sheer providence.
“Each one represents a different kind of miracle,” said Siegel, noting there’s a “big progression” of miracles, and some are more “direct divine intervention than others.”
Siegel imparts an important reminder that being beset by health challenges is precisely the time to tap into one’s faith. His message is that hope is mandatory.
Take the story of Dr. Tom Catena. A medical missionary deep in the rural Nuba Mountains of ravaged Sudan who’s never had formal surgical training is suddenly faced with a kid patient with advanced kidney cancer.
Though “terrified,” Catena locks eyes with 3-year-old Rita and knows he is her only hope.
Given the notoriously spotty Internet in this remote region, Catena prays to God on his hands and knees to access any instructional videos on the difficult surgery.
Through sheer luck — a miracle, really — the Internet kicks in, and Catena finds a YouTube video about operating on kids with kidney cancer, showing the equipment and techniques in Polish, a language he doesn’t understand.
The Internet went down before the video finished, but the doctor prayed for little Rita while telling himself, “God fills in the gaps beyond what I can do.”
Four years after the successful surgery, 7-year-old Rita is cancer-free and surviving in her war-torn country, another test of faith.
“The miracle isn’t always a medical miracle,” said Siegel.
Siegel Tamara Beckwith
Siegel is in awe of Catena’s courage, calling the American Catholic missionary a “larger-than-life figure who inspires me beyond belief and makes me glad I chose medicine. It reminds me of what I’m trying to do as a doctor.”
These are inspiring — if inexplicable — tales of transformation, the real-life roller coasters of people who in the blink of an eye are patients, some on the sudden brink of death, who become modern medical miracles.
These remarkable stories of faith are a powerful reminder of the miracles that challenge the limits of medical understanding.
It’s precisely when the outlook is bleak that faith is most critical.
There’s no shortage of inspiring figures in the book — on both sides of the operating table.
Ellay Hogeg-Golan is a 34-year-old doctor who on Oct. 7, 2023, found herself on the very ventilator she was trained to manage after being burned alive alongside her husband and infant daughter inside her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
Her medical team at Sheba Medical Center is so impressed by Ellay’s grit — overcoming 60% of her body covered in burns and 53 days in a coma — they invite her to finish her medical training at the hospital where she was brought back from the brink of death.
She couldn’t wait to get back to work to bring “hope” to patients.
“She’s a doctor, covered with burns and still in pain and going right back to her residency. Who wouldn’t want her as a doctor?” marveled Siegel.
Sometimes the miracle is life itself.
Siegel’s message is simple, yet profound. In these times, it’s important to think about a higher being — “to fear but also to love.”
“If you direct your fear towards God, you won’t loathe and fear each other,” said the doc, adding wryly that a study revealed the right frontal lobe of the brain is where the belief in miracles resides — along with political divisiveness.
The idea is that “we can replace one with the other,” and Siegel’s important theme of hope, kindness and community is as timely as ever.
“I’m a person who doesn’t give up, so miracles suit me because I want to take it that extra mile,” he said.
Siegel counts among his inspirations his centenarian parents, Annette and Bernard, whose longevity the doctor considers a miracle in light of multiple “near misses.”
Cardinal Timothy Dolan discusses “soft miracles” in the book, and Siegel asked him if his niece battling and beating cancer is one. “I say yes, that and Doctor Berginelli,” recalled Siegel of their conversation. “It’s a combination.”
The so-called soft miracle can mean faith combined with advances in medicine “where a skilled physician serves ‘at the hands of God,’ ” writes Siegel.
Dolan told Siegel that “the miracle is not the one you pray for or are expecting but is simply the one God has decided to give,” writes Siegel of the esteemed archbishop of New York. “A miracle may be a sign that has nothing to do with the actual medicine of the situation, but an occurrence that immediately wraps that medicine in miraculous circumstances of hope and recovery.”
The Fox News senior medical analyst counts the longevity of his centenarian parents, Annette and Bernard, as inspiration. Courtesy of Fox News Books
Siegel, a man of science, doesn’t shy away from the term; he has reverence for it. “There are miracles in daily life,” he said. “I think life is a miracle.”
As Siegel writes, “God’s presence is real whether the patient or doctor recognizes it or not.”
While his colleagues are open to miracles, Siegel addresses how he speaks to patients on the subject — whether it’s giving “false hope” or if it’s essential to talk to them about the power of miracles.
“You have to meet people where they are,” asserted Siegel, noting the critical importance of leaving the door open for hope and “not closing that door prematurely.”
To that end, prayer can play a role in a doctor’s professional life with patients — even praying for and with them.
“It shows the patient that you’re on their level and that you’re open to their hopes and their beliefs,” said Siegel. “You don’t want a doctor that doesn’t believe in that.”
Siegel reported that an NYU colleague, the gastroenterology department head, prays with Cardinal Dolan before a colonoscopy.
The book is meant to tell fellow docs “you can pray with your patients.”
Writing it even changed the author.
“These stories inspire me and have definitely changed my outlook both towards medicine and life in a very positive way,” he said. “It’s made me more humble, and that’s what we’re supposed to be as physicians. We’re just servants of God. We’re bringing God’s gifts to our patients.”