Life Audio. I think the valuing of a human life and the preciousness of the soul is intertwined with the physical skills we have, and the more those skills advance in modern day, the more that physicians have the hands of God.
And that's what my book is about.
I'm really curious how other doctors and or academics view you.
What I'm bringing to this that isn't really been talked about before is that I'm creating a theory that's really going to be quite popular, which is that instead of dismissing people, let's honor them.
And doctors want to do that.
From the collapse of the NFL player Tomorrow Hamlin to the son of Fox News host Brett Baer to an eighth grader from Missouri who fell through the ice and was underwater for ten minutes and flatlined for more than fifty our guest today claims there are miracles all around us today. Doctor Mark Siegel is new Senior Medical Analyst as well as a clinical professor of medicine and a
practicing internist at NYU. Doctor Siegel, thanks for writing a fascinating book and thanks for joining me on the show.
Great to be on with you sean.
Of course, my intro question is why would a practicing medical doctor, professor, and TV analyst who's got a million things going on not only write a book but write this book.
Well, I write books all the time, and I'm a writer. I trained in writing and creative writing and journalism before I ever became a physician. That helps because when you become a physician, a lot of physicians think, oh, I can do anything when you can't. But I believe you can do two things well in life. And I started my life as a writer and then became a physician. And I mean, I believe that being able to communicate is important to a physician.
But medicine is a different language.
It's its own language, and not everyone can translate it into layman's terms struggle to do that. I think it's more important that we get the medicine right than that
we communicate, but both are important. I think it's not even a question about the idea of combining faith with medicine, because it shouldn't even be a question because when you begin to study medicine at a very young age, I mean when you're young and you're in training, one of the first things that you discover is the incredible qualities in the human body, in the mind and the body, the spirit, the preciousness of each life. We learn it
in medical school. So how does the physician go from there where it's imbued in their early training to start dismissing people like in Canada where medical assistance in dying is leading to homeless people being put to death. That's extreme example, sure, But I think the valuing of a human life and the preciousness of the soul is intertwined with the physical skills we have, and the more those skills advance in modern day, the more that physicians have
the hands of God. And that's what my book is about. That's one of the things my book is about. Another thing that it's about is the idea that miracles don't occur all at once most of the time. It's not that they don't ever occur that way. I think that the miracles that the Catholic Church's church honors are real and they have very strict criteria, and I believe it does happen that direct divine intervention leads to miracle cures
that science can't explain. But there are other miracles that are an accumulation of what are seemingly coincidences where positive outcomes occur where negative outcomes were far more likely, and then there's an accumulation of positive outcomes that occur that add up to the miracle.
The publisher of this book kept saying.
To me, identify the miracle in each chapter here, and we had a very fun back and forth on that, because I feel that each chapter is an accumulation of multiple miracles.
M Well, it definitely reads that way, and it's interesting. We're going to get to how you kind of define what you mean specifically by a miracle. But I'm really curious how your training in internal medicine shapes the way you think about assessing miracles. And in part what I'm asking is help those of us who are not medical doctors as best you can get inside your mind how you think about and approach this given your training in medicine.
Well, I don't think it's I don't think that's what it is. I think I don't. I think that doctors participate in miracles, and whether they believe or not is almost beside the point. In my book, there's multiple doctors who are disbelievers or doubters, and then by virtue of what they participate in, they become true believers. Some do, some don't. It almost doesn't matter. As long as you show the flexibility and honoring the patient and healing, and
you're a healer, you are participating in miracles. God is present, God fills in the gaps. I mean, you could argue that all day long, but it's just a fruitless argument because it doesn't change the reality. As long as the physician is open to the idea that there's a greater reality than that they themselves control, the better the physician
they're going to be. What really influenced me early in my training was that when I was an intern, I was assigned to a case in the ICU of a guy who was in a vegetative state and in a coma, and the family was at the bedside, praying all day long, every day, and they kept saying to me, Look his eyelids are fluttering. Look his heart rate is going up a little, Look his blood pressure is going up.
It imbued on me.
The frustrations of them, not of this family, not accepting what seemed to be the reality and not giving up. And I thought it was going to form a very negative view in my approach to healthcare. I thought this is going to be the future, me consoling families to accept a limited reality. Instead, after three months, the guy woke up, he got out of bed, and he went back.
To work, and they were right.
They were right, and we were wrong, and we were jaundiced and we were sarcastic, and we were educated by this case, and it changed how I viewed medicine super interesting.
Some of that comes through in the book, and a lot of the stories give us a sense of what you mean by miracle. Because you talk about medical miracles, you talk about some that seemed to take place through the means and practice of a doctor. You talk about some that seemed to just result that there's this healing process of somebody who just believes in God and has hope.
But then there's other times where you talk about these clear, almost unmista'stakably supernatural interventions, which is probably more typically what we mean by miracle. So when you say the miracles amongst us, tell us what you mean by that.
You know early on in the process, I got the privilege in honor of interviewing Cardinal Dolan and Cardinal Dolan surprised me, and I think he unintentionally broadened the motif of this book because I asked him what he thought a miracle was, and he said, there is the Catholic Church definition, but there's also what I'm calling. He said,
soft miracles. I said, what is a soft miracle? He says, a soft miracle is an accumulation of great faith and great science, and they're intertwined and they established themselves over time. He gave as an example someone in his family where they asked someone close to him, was she healed? Did her cancer go away? Because of divine intervention? And the response was that and doctor Berganelli.
So, in other words, it's not wont a or b.
And it's so important that this book is out because we went down a rabbit hole with Spinoza in the sixteen hundreds where he said God is only found in nature. He didn't say there was no God. He said God is only found in nature. And to be sure, nature is a direct manifestation of God and God's beauty and God's grace. But there's also a personal God, as in my book. Pope John Paul made that point to Robert Redfield, the former CDC director when he was when they were
meeting to discuss the ages epidemic. Right at the heart of it, he said, the Pontiff said, there's a personal God that we all have to recognize, and we can channel our prayer towards that personal God, which makes prayer the greatest tool we have for healing those are That's one and two. One, there's a personal God accepted to prayer as a very powerful tool, the most powerful tool. And the third is there's a redemptive value in human suffering. Well,
Redfield rejected that. As a physician, he didn't liked that. He said, I don't agree with you, he said to the Pope, but he said that over his career he's come to see that that that's correct, that there is a redemptive value in human suffering. I think in the Jewish faith that has to do with something very basic in the Old Testament, in the Talmud that basically says we're being tested by God. Every day, we're being tested by God, and do we pass the test do we not?
And it helps define who we are as people and whether we're deemed worthy in the Almighty's eyes.
I'm a Christian theology professor. More specifically apologetics and evangelism. So most of the people I interview here will be Christians and Evangelicals, but I talk with a lot of people of different faiths. Just had a friendly debate with an Orthodox to youw about the expectation the Messiah and
the identity of Jesus. Really fun. In this book, you talk about your Jewish faith some I'd be really curious what you mean by that, because obviously there's concerted Jews, there's Orthodox Jews, and how that shapes the way you approach miracles.
You know, I'm a lavy, and the lavy is someone that's a servant of the kohene. And interestingly enough, Aaron, Moses's brother was the first lavy, and what he did was he performed miracles all day long with his staff, and those were minor miracles.
And I think that's another thing that led to this.
So that's another thing that informed my faith, is that I see myself as someone who performs service for others. That's what I do as a physician, that's what I try to do as a person. I think it's a deep part of my identity, my faith. So I don't distinguish, I don't distinguish, you know, so much between being Jewish between being Christian. I think it's a matter of believing in God, and I don't really think of it as a separate issue. I think of it in terms of faith.
And I've experienced miracles in my own life that have led me to that, Like when my first son was born and I was going through a period of confusion, like what's my role? What am I going to do? And how do I care for my son? And I was walking down the street and I saw a man praying and he handed me his prayer book and he said, take this and pray for the health of your newborn son. And I said, how do you know I have a son? I didn't say anything. So he was an angel from
the Lord. I mean there as I left Showan, I look back over my shoulder.
Is he really there? A visitation?
He was there, But that changed my life and I pray. But I don't judge people to say, oh, this is their faith, this is my faith. I think there's a community there. My friendship with Cardinal Doan is a great example of that, or Jolo'stein. I'm friends with Jolostein Pastor Ostein Pastor Sam Rodriguez, a dear close friend of mine, inspired a lot of the parts of this book. He
in fact did a movie on Breakthrough. You were talking about Breakthrough, and the breakthrough moment actually is when John Smith, after everything he experiences, communes with Pastor Sam and then he decides that what he's been through is so special and so unusual. It brings him faith that he then wants to show to the rest of the world. It's the same thing that's happened to Christopher Smith. He's not in my book, but he'll be in the next one,
who I reported on recently on TV. Smith got shot in the head and a woman he was going on a first date with got shot in the head as well as she died. He survived and got a visitation from his father, who died when he was eight years old, and the vision said to him, the way you know this is me, that I'm your father is that when I was lying in my coffin, my best friend Brett, put two marijuana cigarettes in my left pocket. And there's only two people in the world that know about that,
Brett and your mother. And he said, you're gonna live. You're gonna survive. This ordeal, and you're gonna wake up and you're gonna go on to have a fairly normal life. Chris Smith woke up two months later in the ICU, remember that visitation, told his mother and she broke into tears, talked to Brett. Only two people that knew it was absolutely true. And then Smith went on cognitively and recovered.
He's got stem cell injections to get strengths back in his left side, and he's going around spreading the word. And I think that that's another message in my book, which is spreading the word. Not read the stories and see if you believe, See if you believe after you read the stories, compared to win before you read them.
Where your book is primarily full of stories. And I was reading it this morning to my wife as she was running out the door to teach math today. I said, oh man, there's some stories here over dinner tonight I want to share with you and talk about and process. So that jumped out to me really quick. It's full stories. Part of me has a million theological questions for you about your faith and how you practice it and what that means. That is a separate conversation. Maybe we'll come
back to that. But I've also I've done a lot of shows on visions and near death experiences, and I'm convinced they're verritical. But let's jump to some of the stories in the book. I read a lot of different news sources. I read the New York Times every morning, but one host I really enjoy is Brett Baer and Him and His Son is the first story in your book, which just jumped out to me. So share that story as much as you can, and tell tell else why you put that in the realm of a modern day miracle.
Because of the accumulation of events.
It's like everybody listening to this podcast or watching it right now will know about the coincidence that occur when you're thinking of someone in the phone rings right after that. How did that happen? What is telepathy? Where's that coming from? It's a direct proof of a larger spiritual reality. So are dreams. Brett bare their son Paul, their first son Amy. They meet with a series of coincidences. But then their first son is born and he's not thriving, and he's
very pale. And the first miracle in that chapter is that a doctor who's an expert at this happens to be passing the hospital and he's not even on call, and he says, you know, I think I'm going to go in, and he.
Doesn't know why. Why does he go in?
Goes in, finds out about Paul, and says, I'm going to look into this, even though he's not working.
He does an echo cardiogram.
He finds the problem in his heart, which is multiple abnormalities cardiac congenital abnormalities, and over the next several months they work on repairing them, and it's not perfect because of the size, being so small of the heart. Brett and Amy are a team. Amy full of love, Brett full of having to have his questions answered. They meet another woman there who has a child the same age as Paul, in similar straits, and they root for each other and they pray for each other. And Brett's prayer
is in my book. I have a prayer section in my book of famous prayers written for the book by great spiritual leaders. If I had known you, Sean, I would have asked you for a prayer when I wrote the book. But Brett's prayer is in there, and he says, we pray for one more day, we pray for one more day. That's a lot in the theme of this book.
And through the.
Years they go through different oh and tragically the woman who is rooting with them, her daughter dies and they feel great suffering over the loss, but she stays with them as a dear friend over the years as they become more and more involved in National Children's Hospital. The chapter focuses on the fifth heart surgery where Paul has a cold and he goes in to see his new internest and he says, this is just a cold. But then he says, but you know, same as the doctor
passing the hospital. You know, just to be sure, I'm going to do a chest X ray. If you ask that doctor as part of a board question, Sean, should you do a chest X ray? The answer is no, you don't. You wouldn't check that box. But God checks the right box, right, so that intuition, maybe I should
do a chest X ray. And he does it and it shows a slight widening of the heart and he said, you know, this is normal for a kid, for a guy in his condition, but just to be sure, I'm going to show this to his cardiologist shows it to his cardiologists who says, you know, I could pass this, but just to be sure, I'm going to do an echo cardiogram. He does an echo cardiogram and he finds an aneurysm that's about to burst. They have surgery schedule for the next day. Paul goes out and plays golf
with Brett. Paul wins, and then he gets his life is saved with another successful operation. And over the years, Amy and Brett, who are fantastic parents, are relinquishing more control of the situation to their son, which is correct.
So he's a very courageous.
Young man with a lot of spiritual transcendence, because if our souls are tested enough, we mature. The miracle in that chapter is not one miracle. It's an accumulation of well, maybe I shouldn't, but just to be sure is the miracle.
That distinction is helpful. I want to make sure our audience doesn't miss that. You have some examples in your book of prayers that are done and just instantaneous, supernatural events take place to save somebody's life. That because the timing and the specificity just can't be explained away scientifically alone. Then you talk about miracle as a certain number of seeming coincidences that collectively lead towards something positive that in
themselves can't be explained away when taken collectively. I'll let folks think about that and analyze that. But is that a fair distinction to you?
Yeah, it's perfect, except that one thing needs to be added here is get Brett and Amy prayed and prayed and prayed every single day. And I believe that that's part of it too. That's part of it too. And I don't want science analyzing that. How ridiculous that we would use the tool of science to analyze whether prayer is working or not.
Wait, that's the opposite of what we should do. You should use the.
Tool of prayer to analyze whether the science is working.
That quote you just said might go viral. I love that that'll get some people thinking. So you mentioned within the story before we move to the NFL player Tamar Hamlin, and then a couple other counts that I think are just stunning examples of sudden, supernatural kind of one time intervention miracles. You mentioned somebody in the story with Brett whose child was not healed and may have been praying as well. Before we get to some of the other miracles. What would you say as a person of faith, as
a scientist, as somebody. He says, I prayed, and he say there's miracles amongst us, but I'm not experiencing one.
There's two answers to that.
One is that God chooses the miracles he wants to give. That came from Dolan also and the other people in the book. God gives us the miracles he wants to give us, not the ones we pray for. And the second part of that is I'll give let me stick on the first part.
Sure.
The two examples from the Old Testament on that I use in the book. One is Hannah is praying for a son, and she's not given a son till she's very, very old. Her sister has seven children, I believe multiple children, and Hannah finally gets the son, and the son she calls the son schmul or Samuel mean, God hurts my prayer. But the lesson there is that God doesn't grant her
wish because she wishes for it. He grants the child because he knows that Samuel is going to go on to become a great prophet and lead a nation and lead to King David. So that's the reason he grants
the prayer. And another striking example from the Old Testament is Hezekiah, who's a king, and Hezekiah is suffering from a sore that looks like it's going to kill him, and he goes to Isaiah and Isaiah says, you're going to die from that sore and Isaiah and Hezekiah doesn't really want to accept that prophecy from Isaiah because Isaiah
is not God, he's a prophet. He doesn't want to accept that prophecy, so he goes to God, and in going directly to God, Hezekiah learns that what's really at stake here is that Hezekiah has a father who is a bad king. Hezekiah was a great king. Hezekiah's son is destined to be a bad king. And God says, I will save you, but you have to follow your faith. So Hezekiah marries Isaiah's daughter and has a child who's a bad king, and his sores are healed and he
lives on God saves him. That's a really great lesson of God giving the miracles that he wants us to have, not the ones we're asking for, because because what Isaiah, what Hezekiah was asking for is I don't want my son to be another bad king, but God, prophet God had chosen that he would be a bad king.
The other thing I want to and I.
And I have that in the chapter in my book, and then and then it leads to a story from the Holocaust. But I also want to talk about something else, which is that a few of the characters in my book, most strikingly in the chapter about October seventh, twenty twenty three, an amazing story of a family that was saved from a fire where they were burned alive by Amas. The I ask when I'm interviewing them, why did God choose
you for the miracle? Why did God choose you? And their answer is very sobering, And it's the same thing that Benjamin Hall, our amazing reporter at Fox, has said to me, which is, I refuse to call what happened to me a miracle, because even though it is, it dishonors those who didn't make it. To be the recipient of a miracle is a very humbling thing. It's not something that you brag about.
That's such an interesting point. There's a certain weight to experience a miracle. Everybody wants one, but then when you get one and others don't for reasons, Like you said, God's sovereignty, we may or may not understand. There's a weight that comes to that, maybe akin to what some
people call survivors guild. But nonetheless, you and I might differ over some things in the New Testament, but we agree to God is sovereign in that he does miracles according to his prerogative and larger desire for the world. So that's a really helpful point to dry out. Tell us about the chapter on the NFL player Damar Hamlin and why you consider that a modern miracle.
Because the other thing I'm trying to do in this book is to look underneath what everyone thinks the miracle is and see if there's another miracle that you don't know about. I want it to be and what my editor to the book says, make it so that the reader doesn't know the miracle. Off the top, the miracle with DeMar would seem to be, Wow, he fell down, he had a cardiac arrest, they brought him back.
That would seemed to be the miracle. Sure, here's the real miracle.
The real miracle is that Damar Hamlin safety for the Buffalo Bills, got hit in the chest with a helmet right in the middle of his cardiac cycle, even with shoulder pads on, and had a cardiac arrest. That is really really unusual for someone of his age wearing full garb.
It's really really, really really rare.
But on top of that, it turns out, and I found this out through interviewing multiple people. I interviewed the team physician for the Cincinnati Bengals, who talked about what happened on the field. But then I got to Leslie Bisson, who's the team physician for the Buffalo Bills, and they run the show for their visit for their players, even if they're in a visiting stadium. And Bisson said, back in two thousand and seven, look at how this miracle works, Sewan.
We're talking twenty twenty three here, and the miracle starts back in two thousand and seven. This is how God performs miracles. I had a skater, he said, that was visiting the Buffalo Savers and I was their team physician, and he got a skate to the coortid artery and he almost spled to death and I barely saved them. And he had multiple units of blood and thank god
he was okay. And I said, at that point, if I'm gonna petition paid in sports medicine for these guys who are larger than life, they're like superheroes, they're like, you know, physical prowess, he says, I'm going to insist that we rehearse severe outcomes and cardiac arrests every month, every single month, as what we would do.
And he said, everybody made fun of me.
There hasn't been a cardiac arrest in the NFL since nineteen fifty five. Why would you do that? And I made him do it, he said, I made him do it. Take the shoulder pants off, here are the scissors, apply the defibrillator, rush onto the field.
Rehearsed.
So when it got to DeMar, they just hauled out the rehearsal and they got his heart started again within one minute time his brain. So the reason he recovered was because of that protocol that nobody thought, that everyone thought was insane. Then of course he had several days where he was coming back to himself. It wasn't the way the media presented it. And it is a true
miracle that he went from there to playing again. But the reason the miracle occurred was because of this spooky rehearsal that Bison told me he had a premonition.
I do have to say one of my favorite parts of the chapter is that when Demarrow came back to consciousness, his first question was who won the game? And the doctor says back, you won the game of life? Like that gave me goosebumps. And I agree with you if we're using the term kind of a soft miracle, Like I think you're right about this, but I can also understand why skeptics go, yeah, but maybe they're just lucky.
Like try to explain it away evidentially speaking, these next two examples that you give, by the way, I.
Don't think they can.
I don't think they can tell me about that roach.
Let's explain something away. Why would you do that? Why don't you learn and.
Listen from the proximity issue?
You know, Like like I just told you something about Hamlin that's unbelieve but it actually happened, you know. So it's I call it not in the book, but I've called it since the book the miracle lane.
You're in a lane.
And somebody said to me last night at an interview of something I liked. Imagine all the things that wouldn't have led to this lane, in other words, where it didn't all come together the right way. That's also evidence of God's fingerprints when everything happens in just the right way. My father's one hundred and two years old. He's on dialysis. He had a ventilator, and he was ninety eight. He had a hip operation and a pin put in his hip when he was ninety eight. He survived major abdominal
surgery and hernia repair. When he was ninety eight, he had a fistol that was draining and the surgeon said it's never gonna heal, but it healed.
And he's one hundred and two and my mother's a hundred. How did that happen?
Because at each turn of the road, a seeming non miracle added to an attumnbe that is a miracle. One hundred and two, one hundred still with it held together by love doesn't want to leave the other one alone.
So for the skeptic were to push back and say, you know, doctor Siegel, it may it makes sense. There's a number of factors that line up for say tomorrow Hammelin line up for your father who's one hundred and two, which is pretty amazing. But most people don't survive that kind of cardiac arress. Most people don't live to one
hundred and two. So given how many people there are, it makes sense that just mathematically, at times we'd have these exceptions and we're calling them a miracle, but mathematically speaking, there could be an explanation for him.
Well, that's part of what a miracle is a miracle. That's Dolan's soft miracles, which is that at each juncture there could be a partial scientific reason. I looked at for another book I did on that, not a miracle book, but I have a story in this book of a guy who rises out of a wheelchair to attack someone who owes him two million dollars when he hasn't walked in months and months and months, and a psychiatrist said, we're putting you in a mental hospital for saying you're
going to do that, because you can't do that. You can't do that. Well, he did it, and why did he do it? How did he do it? How can somebody walk again that was told they're never going to walk again.
I can come up with some.
Science, said, your brain pivots the hamstrings, and that when your mind is on fire, you can somehow partly. There's always some science, but miracles aren't. Again, only the Catholic Church maybe disagrees with me the strict interpretation of the Vatican.
And that's why I include in the book a chapter on lords, and I take very seriously with the Catholic Churches saying, but there's a broad expanse of miracles that are an accumulation, like Aaron's miracles in the Old Testament, and so this guy rising out of the wheelchair is a miracle.
So this story really hit me because it's about an eighth grader outside of Saint Louis, and I have a son who rode his bike to school this morning. He's a seventh grader who fell through the ice and was underwater at least ten minutes, flatlined for more than fifty Well, i'm reading this, I got goosebumps and just this sense of like the worst nightmare a parent could imagine. Tell us what happened? Why you consider that a miracle?
By the way, I just want to be clear on something that I believe that each miracle in each chapter of this book, whether I'm using my definition of soft miracles or accumulation of miracles, or one that's more stark, where like you know, like Dodio Stein comes home and praise and has a series of prayers and cancer goes away four times, four diferent cancers go away, and she starts, and she's in the Lakewood Church and people come there to have their cancer go and some of them do,
some of them do. There's a great healing aspect going on there with Joel O'stein and paul O'stein, and Dody Ostein and Lisa O'stein comes, lis O'stein comes, all of them I interviewed for this book. But I also believe the other chapters are miracles. I think Tomorrow Damar is a miracle. I think Brett bear Soon is a miracle. I think some of the ones I haven't mentioned are the chapter on Breakthrough. I'll tell you something that I
haven't been saying, which you'll resonate with. Part of that miracle does involve Pastor Sam Rodriguez because he had a sister, he had a daughter who was he had a daughter who was dying in the ICU of Covid, and he was one of the first that was put on steroids and she was on echmo, she was on respiratory assist and she was fading. And Sam was in another room
praying and all of a sudden he felt something. He felt something and he called up his daughter and he said, has something just changed and the door because I was just praying for you, and she said, there were just angels in the room here with me. And he asked what the angels looked like. She said they were light and they were very positive. From that moment on, she recovered.
So that's one kind of miracle. And then Sam was involved with the breakthrough miracle where the eighth grader, these guys go to the lake Lake Saint Louis and it's freezing out and they go skating on the ice the way boys do. They come home and the sister of one of the boys says.
Why didn't you include me? So they say, okay, we'll go again. So the next day they go back to the lake idiots.
It's in the forties and they go skating on the ice again and they all fall in. The emergency responders come and they can't find John Smith. They got the other two and then there's a voice from the shore that says fifteen feet to the right. And one of the things I do in each of these chapters is verify all of this because I want the reader to know this is the truth. I'm telling you. It's not
just some fanciful story. That's why you don't have to be a believer to believe at the end of this book, because there was no one at the shore, but the voice was of the boss of the emergency responder. I know that because I called him and I went over with him. I said, where will you when this happened? He said, I was in my office in Saint Louis. I said, did you have a sense of what was going on? He said yes, but I wasn't there. And
so they pull John Smith out of the water. And so then I knew some medical critics might say to me, and no one has. By the way, I think doctors are actually believers, because I haven't been getting a lot of negative feedback at all on this book because it's so researched.
And they pull.
Him out of the water, and I knew someone was going to say, could this be hypothermia?
So I called up Michael Boden, who's.
In another one of the chapters in this book, the top forensic pathologist in the country. I said, what would it be to be in the water for fifteen minutes in the forty temperatures in the forties like on that day.
He says, minimal, minimal.
He says, if you're if it's in the twenties or you know, ten degrees, then you could say the organs are frozen and it might take a while for them to thaw.
But in the.
Forties you get a minimal amount of hypothermic effect. So the fact that he has no pulse for over like fifty to fifty five minutes is unheard of. Now they start CPR, They get him to the hospital, and the team in the hospital wants to let go. They they've never brought anybody back from fifty five minutes. I talk to all of them, the emergency responders, the physicians, They all.
Say that.
They've never had a case like this. She the mother, would not let him go, she said to them, And I interviewed her too. She said to them, wait till I get to the hospital, do not let him go. Now that sentiment is normal, Yeah, that part's not a miracle. But the fact that they listen to her, and she gets to the hospital. She hits the er and gets down on her knees and prays to God. As soon as she does that, his pulse comes back. And then I said to the doctors, Okay, that's clearly God's presence,
that's divine intervention. But what's the chances that John Smith could get from from there to anything resembling normal life. They say, zero. We've never had a case like that. We never had the fifty five minutes, we've never had under the ice, We've never had that voice from the shore. And John Smith fully recovers when his post comes back.
I interviewed him for this book. And then the breakthrough occurs years later when he meets Pastor Sam and tells him this story, and he becomes a devout Christian, realizing that he is the recipient.
Of a miracle.
And like a lot of people in this book, and this may be the part I'm proudest of, and it goes for DeMar Hamlin, it goes for many of the people in the book.
Tomar gives back. He's out in the.
Community doing CPR teaching CPR teaching the proper use of defibrillators, creating scholarships for underprivileged young people as a result of God blessing him.
And that's what John Smith did. He became an evangelical. He it uses his story to teach people to believe.
That did jump out to me because I teach a class at Tables School theology on why does God allow evil? And one of the things we talk about, and there's so many more pieces than this, is that when people go through suffering, that often awakens them to give back in exponential ways. You see that with Damari, you see that with so many other stories that you tell. So that's one way God can use such tragedies. But let me ask you one.
It's by the way, that may be why, that may be why the pontav is saying the redemptive value in human suffering one of the reasons.
One of the reasons good. So one of the stories that really jumped out to me for a number of reasons, but in part because one of the doctors and people there were on Camps Crusade for Christ's staff. My parents are still on Crusade staff, what is known as crew. So I've been on trips kind of like this, and it's in the Mountains of Sudan, and it's not where the heart art of the war is at, but you describe how it spills over into this area and how
I think there's a hospital within. I can't move said one hundred or three hundred miles, like medical care is just so rare. And there's a three year old named Rita. Tell us the story of what happened, and in particular, don't leave out the detail about the YouTube video and the internet connection, because that strikes as something almost clearly supernatural. I think, at least to critics.
I've been lucky enough, through an organization called African Mission Healthcare, to meet a number of amazing missionary doctors who are out there saving lives by the thousands. And the Nuba Mountains of Sudan is right in the middle of war torn Sudan, which everybody knows about. People are displaced, there's more refugees there than anywhere in the world, and people are living in caves, people are living without running water. It's horrendous. In the middle of all this is Tom Katina,
who's a family practitioner. He was a name flight surgeon and went to the same university. I went to Brown and he he's a real larger than life figure. I have interviewed him a few times on the radio for this book, recently for our Fox Nation special. He's just larger than life, very very humble man. And he runs this entire hot four hundred and fifty bed hospital. And one day a young girl named Rita comes and he uses a cat skin and diagnoses her with bilateral kidney
cancer called Wilm's tumor. But he's only ever operated removing a single kidney. He's never done a partial in the frectomy remove half of a kidney. And you've got to understand these conditions. Generally, no anesthesiologists. They use bellows to blow the anesthesia over a person. You know, they have intravenous they have medications, but they have a lot of scarcity. They have to use old autoclaves to sterilize equipment.
It's very rudimentary stuff. And he happened to have visiting him.
I'm another family practitioner from Washington, DC, who said, what are you going to do? And Tom said, I'm gonna have to try to operate, but I've never done this before. So the other doctor says, why don't you go on the Internet and see if you can get an instructional video for surgeons on this, and Katina said, and I asked Katina about his surgical skill for the Fox Nation special, and he's very.
Very, very very good surgeon.
But he made an interesting comment that he didn't train as a surgeon in school, so he doesn't understand surgical disease the way a surgeon might. But his technical skills are top notch. So but he can't do this surgery. So he goes on the Internet, but there is no internet, and there hasn't been an Internet working there for weeks
and weeks and weeks. So they go to the computer and they're pounding on the computer and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, God wills the internet to be on after weeks of no internet, and it's very slow and they can barely get it anything to upload, and they managed to go to YouTube and to get an instructional video of how to do a partial the phrectomy in Polish. Sean in Polish, and neither of them speak Polish, and
they must. They're agonizingly going through this video with almost none of the equipment that the Polish surgeons have, and halfway through it crashes and they look at each other and they go, well, Polish, we don't understand equipment, we don't have.
What do we do?
And they said, maybe we just got enough information here to make this work.
Maybe.
So he goes ahead and he does the operation, removes the cancer's kidney, removes what he thinks the other half of the kidney is and is successful he thinks, but he's estimating. And he gets her out of anesthesia. There's rudimentary anesthesia, and he gives her chemo because they don't have radiation in this hospital, and she goes back to her cave or wherever she's living with her mother. Six
months later, she comes back completely cured. A year later, comes back completely cured, no recurrence, and that's God's divine intervention.
Yeah, that story was amazing to me. I'm just trying to picture it in my mind of like no internet connection, you happen to get an internet connection enough to have a YouTube video which is more than an email, and then they find the right video in Polish, and I'm just imagining this brilliant doctor who's watching YouTube video how to do a surgery, and it's enough to help him to do it. She recovers. It's just like, you can't make this kind of story up. So that was one
of my favorite. You have a full story that you don't need to go into detail. In terms of the chapter in which the Congressman Steve Scalise is shot on a baseball field in twenty seventeen. I'm bringing this one up because I'd love you to comment on a quote in there from another congressman. And the heart of my question is just how you see the connection between faith, just having belief and healing even if there's not a
supernatural miracle. And I ask it that way because in light of the recovery of Congressman Steve Scalise, another congressman said, quote, Steve's support structure and faith leads to his courage and strength. It leads directly to his ability to recover. So this seems to be this congreman is just saying there's not necessarily a miracle that took place here, if I read it correctly, but just having faith contributes to somebody healing.
How do you see that intersection between faith and healing, even if there may not be a miracle.
There is a miracle, and Scalise says there's a miracle.
He said flat out for the book and for the Fox Nation special that his survival here was a miracle. But you're talking about something else that I'll get to in a minute. But the first part of the miracle is that Brad Weinstrip, a fellow congressman, happens to be in the batting cage that day when he's never in the batting cage. He hates the batting cage. He doesn't like balls thrown his way, he doesn't like the automatic machine. He's never in the batting cage. He doesn't know why
he was in the batting cage. If he hadn't been in the batting cage, he would have been shot because he would have been in a position to be killed. That's the first part of the miracle. The thing you're referring to, though, is that Scalise says that when he gives over control to God the way we all should, God is a higher being.
God is the Almighty.
When you understand that the only thing you shoul supposed to be afraid of is God, not each other, not physical circumstances, not daily coincidences, not somebody yelling at you, not somebody antagonizing you. But God is what you have to worry about and be afraid of and make amends with and pray to when you realize that school, he says, a colm comes over you, and that's what he was referring to. But what happened there was an enormous miracle
because why was Winstrip there? Why did weinstrimp think to rush out and apply the tourniquet. Why did Winstrip give him fluids? Why did Winstrip get the guy over with the intravenous from the ambulance? Why did Weinstrip say, not the ambulance, the helicopter. The helicopter. The ambulance would have killed them. He would have been stuck in DC traffic. Why the helicopter. They got the helicopter. They get him to the hospital. He's lost fifty units of blood. He
comes in with a blood pressure of about zero. Then a surgeon and an interventional radiologist get together. They've never worked together before. They put clams on this severed artery in his that's in pieces. It's like it's like fragmented, and they say, we can't save anybody like this. They wheel a patient out of an operating room with clamps into an interventional radiology suite. I've never seen that. I've never heard of that. These doctors have never heard of that.
But the interventional radiologists working with an open abdomen is able to find the parts of the artery to burn off, to close off with a burning equipment called a brov and made it so that the surgion was then able to operate while they're pouring blood into him. All of this occurs, then he gets out of surgery praying every day, praying to God. And then there's a term that you're very familiar with called community intercession. People were praying for
Steve Scullies from all over the world. Those prayers came in and he says, imbued him with more and more strength.
Other prayers accumulated, and he.
Got through a very difficult rehab process, recovered completely and went back to Congress.
So you hinted at this earlier, and I'd love for you to talk about a little bit more. You work at NYU professor as a doctor, so just a prestigious, highly respected university and medical system, and yet I'm really curious how other doctors and or academics view you. Like what feedback you've got criticism you've got, is it like, well, doctor Siegel means well, but he hasn't got the memo that these things don't happen today, or are you in
the norm? Like, how do people in both those different worlds, as best as you can tell, perceive the work you're doing and especially going to public with it.
Well, this particular book is what you're referring to, and it's had a very, very favorable reaction in the medical community. Nobody's feeling threatened by it. Nobody is defending their atheism. I think I have a theory as to why. I think it's the way I wrote the book. I think the book says, Read this and then you decide I'm not beating anybody over the head with anything. Read the book and you decide. I think my beliefs are pretty mainstream.
But I think what I'm bringing to this that isn't really been talked about before is that I'm creating a theory that's really going to be quite popular, which is that instead of dismissing people, let's honor them. And doctors want to do that. That goes back to calling medicine or calling at a time of robotics and AI and computerization and personalized high tech solutions. It's very refreshing for a doctor to say, let's also honor the human soul and let's honor the preciousness of each life.
Doctors take very well to this message.
Tells me of exactly who you're writing this to, because I really want to interview you because I'm an apologist and an evangelist, and I've had a number of doc there's and others on again to talk about miracles, prayer, near death experiences. So this isn't an apologetics book, but there's a lot of apologetic ideas and arguments within it. It's not an academic book. It's a popular book. So who are you hoping primarily picks this up.
I think it's a book for everyone. I think it's a book for believers to see another believer and to see examples. It's a book of stories that people can relate to who are believers. It's also a book for people on the fence who kind of want to believe, but they don't have examples of it. That's why I wrote the book the way I did, with so many sources. I'm not telling you a story of breakthrough from John Smith's point of view alone, I'm telling you from the
point of view of his mother. You don't want to believe him or his mother. You got Pastor Sam. You don't want to believe him because you think he's too enthusiastic about Christianity. You've got the doctor in the ear why would he make anything up? You got the other doctor that took care of him in the ICU. You have the nurses I interviewed, so you know, you have the emergency responder who said I heard a voice. The voice said, yeah, that was me, but I wasn't there.
So all of that is in there. So it's a book for non believers as well as believers, and maybe, if I had to say, it would be for people on the fence.
Totally fair. So last question, I'm kind of curious how you decided which stories to include, and if there's I didn't count correct me on this one, maybe ten or twelve kind of stories that you focus on. How many other stories are there that you could have included that you didn't.
There's sixteen chapters, there's probably twenty to twenty five miracles in here, and there's probably another ten that didn't make it either. Because I didn't get enough sourcing to feel that I could hit someone over the head with it. Yet maybe I'll put it in the sequel, or or I thought of it after I had written the book, or I wish I.
Had put it in, or.
I got the story after because people are pouring miracles into me now and I'm looking through them already. But I think my favorite miracle sean that didn't make the book and should have let's put it under this should have, okay, is that I mentioned the prayer of Hannah and praying for a son whose name was Samuel, the prophet Samuel. I put that in there, but I also intended to use a prayer about my second son, my youngest son, because when he was born, I didn't have a name
for him. I used biblical names, but I didn't have a name for him, and my wife was pregnant with him, and I was in I was praying in synagogue on the high holiday Rushashana, and the guy in front of me had a baby on his shoulder, and I said, what's the name of that baby?
And he said Samuel.
And then I looked down and I was reading the Prayer of Hannah at the exact moment and it said, you know. And then my son was born and his name was Schmuhl. And then I come home from praying and my daughter is there and she said, I just saw this TV show, this cartoon about Samuel. All three things occur within a half hour, and I'm telling everybody listening to this, you all.
Know that that's not a coincidence.
Then on top of that, I name him that, and he's born and he can't hear when he's born, which is God reminding me that he's in charge of miracles, not me.
So I prayed and they cleared out.
His ears and he got his hearing back before he was discharged from the hospital.
But his first two years.
Of life he had a lot of hearing infections and hearing issues, and he's over them now, thank God. But God reminding me that he's in charge of not just what name I choose, but what happens.
Well, mar I thoroughly enjoyed your book. It was actually a friend of mine, Steve Miller, who I've interviewed probably half a dozen times, one of the experts today on near death experiences, who sent me a link and instantly I thought, oh, man, if doctor Mark Siegel would come on and talk about it. I would love to have them. And as I said earlier, my wife was rushing out
the door to go teach. I said, hang on, I want to share this story with you about Brett Bhaer, whom we both enjoy watching on the news regularly, story about Tamar Hamlin and the other one. So I appreciate the tone. I would second what you said that you're not banging people with these miracles. You're saying, here's what I've seen, Here's where I think the evidence points. You read and you decide, And I think that's a great tone for a book like this. So really appreciate you
coming on, folks. Before you click away and make sure you hit subscribe. We are going to have more stories and interviews on the supernatural, on miracles. You won't want to miss it. And if you want to study apologetics formally, come study with me at Talbot's School of Theology. Information below, And we also have a certificate program that we just updated, big discount below where you can learn apologetics and defending the faith kind of at your own pace and we'll
walk you through it. Doctor Mark Siegel, keep us posted on your next book. Especially when it intersects with kind of supernatural apologetic theology type questions. We'd love to have you back to talk about it. Thanks for your time.
You are a terrific host and a terrific human being. You're walking God's path. Thank you so much for having me today.
You're very kind. Thank you. Hey, friends, if you enjoyed this show, please hit that fall button on your podcast app. Most of you tuning in haven't done this yet, and it makes a huge difference in helping us reach and equip more people and build community. And please consider leaving
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