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You Visited Me.  Grace and Healing in the Modern Medical Center

By Dr Robert Collins, MD            Ignatius Press    ignatius.com

A cancer doctor who lives by evidence and protocols tells a story that begins with an interruption he can’t explain: a question, heard like a voice in a lab, that challenged the idea that reality is only matter and chance. Dr. Robert Collins joins us to talk about his work in leukemia and lymphoma care, his journey from teenage skepticism to Christianity and Catholicism, and why he now sees hope as something sturdier than optimism. If you’ve ever searched for faith and medicine, prayer and healing, or what “whole person care” really means in a hospital, this conversation meets you right where you are. 

We dig into what medicine is actually for, beyond fixing organs and chasing numbers. Dr. Collins explains healing as restoring wholeness, which means treating a patient as a person with relationships, fear, responsibilities, and a spiritual life that shapes how they face illness. He shares how prayer functions in his daily routine and in clinical practice, from quick hallway prayers before entering a room to the rare moments when he prays with a patient, always rooted in presence rather than performance. 

Then we go to the hard ground: miracles and suffering. Dr. Collins offers a wider definition of miracle that includes the quiet work of grace, timely words, and the mysterious overlap of the spiritual and the material. We also wrestle with the question everyone asks sooner or later, why a good God allows suffering, without turning it into bullet points. A patient story of redemptive suffering and a son drawn back to faith shows how love can gather around a person at the end of life.