icular six honorees were chosen over countless others. My doubts were quickly put to rest as this celebrated group recounted one-by-one their diverse and seemingly unconnected journeys from their conventional medicine beginnings to their present-day roles in what has come to be known as “integrative medicine.”

The Pioneer event was organized by the Bravewell Collaborative, a group of well-heeled philanthropists who have quietly been supporting researchers and institutions in the complementary and alternative medicine field for decades. Led by Christy Mack and Penny George, Bravewell has labored to bring about a true revolution in the realm of health and healing. Christy and her husband John Mack, chairman and chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley, last year gave $11 million to fund creation of the Duke Integrative Medicine Center in Durham, North Carolina. All Bravewell members continue supporting their individual charitable interests, while at the same time coming together to provide joint funding for strategic initiatives that serve a broader national purpose. One such initiative is the Consortium of Academic Healthcare Centers for Integrative Medicine, a collaborative of 39 leading U.S. medical schools that offer coursework in the field of integrative medicine. Another was financial support for The New Medicine, a two-hour Public Broadcast System program that explored the science behind mind-body medicine.

Photo:  Rachel Remen, Jon Kabat-Zinn, James Gordon, Dean Ornish, Andrew Weil, and Larry Dossey

So it should be no surprise that the Bravewell folks selected six “pioneers” who are firmly grounded in the world of scientific medicine and academia. As each pioneer told their personal story of conversion from conventional practitioner to pioneering innovator, he and she let it be known that they wanted others to travel the same road and extend the vision. To that end, they worked within the medical education community to train other doctors, published scientific articles in leading medical journals, and create nonprofit organizations that will live on long after they pass from this earth.

Prince Charles

The evening awards ceremony, hosted by John and Christy Mack, featured a videotaped warm welcome from Prince Charles, first in line to the British Throne, who said he was looking forward to working across the Atlantic between his Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health and Bravewell in the U.S.

The morning of November 8 began with three of the pioneers, medical doctors Rachel Remen, Dean Ornish and Andrew Weil appearing together with cardiothoracic surgeon Mehmet Oz on ABC’s Good Morning America. Here are some highlights from the rest of the day’s events:

Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, the only non-MD in the pioneer group, earned his PhD in molecular biology in 1971 from the Massachusetts of Technology, where he studied under Salvador Luria, a Nobel Laureate in Medicine. Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979 and began developing and teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MSBR), an eight-week course based on Buddhist meditative practices and Hatha yoga to patients cope with stress, pain and illness. Kabat-Zinn’s Stress Reduction Program is the oldest and largest academic medical center-based stress reduction program in the world. The program was featured in the Bill Moyers' PBS documentary Healing and the Mind, and in the book of the same title. It has also been featured on Oprah, NBC Dateline, and ABC's Chronicle. Since its inception, more than 17,000 people have completed the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program.

“I discovered Zen meditation while I was a grad student at MIT,” he said. “Philip Kapleau, an American Zen teacher, came to give a talk one day, and I was on of only four people who attended. I was an improbable candidate for a meditator, having grown up on the rough and tumber streets of New York. But Kapleau’s talk inspired me to begin a life-long process of inquiry through meditative awareness. I began to realize the power of being as opposed to the power of doing, and I saw that the ways in which one paid attention made a huge difference in terms of how one perceived and then navigated through the world.

“The Stress Reduction Clinic was an experiment to see if I could bring intensive meditation practices from the Buddhist tradition, but without the Buddhism, into the mainstream of medicine and science, without dumbing down or denaturing the essence, the beauty and depth of these ways of knowing and being.”

To learn more about Jon Kabat-Zinn’s contributions visit the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

James Gordon, MD earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1967. While serving as chief resident in psychiatry at Albert Einstein School of Medicine, he created an inpatient service that treated psychotic people without drugs, an unconventional approach at the time, to say the least. Dr. Gordon is the Founder and Director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, DC. He also created the Professional Training Program in Mind-Body Medicine, which has graduated more than 1500 health professionals, and the CancerGuides® program, which teaches health professionals to help people with cancer create comprehensive and integrative approaches to their care. He was chairperson of the celebrated 2000-2002 White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy.

Dr. Gordon’s latest endeavor is the Healing the Wounds of War program, which has taught mind-body skills to leaders in health and mental health in Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia, Israel, and Gaza to help them deal with their own stress and, in turn, to bring effective, integrative care to entire populations traumatized by war. He is the author of many books, including Manifesto for a New Medicine and the soon-to-be-published Unstuck: The Seven Stage Journey from Depression to Delight. Gordon also serves as clinical professor in the departments of psychiatry and family medicine at Georgetown University’s School of Medicine.

“I left the National Institute of Mental Health after working there ten years in the Seventies,” Gordon said. “I was hoping to form a healing community that could be of service to large numbers of people. This led me to create the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, which is dedicated to making self awareness, self care and mutual help central to all of medicine, and to the education of our children. We’ve developed successful training programs in mind-body medicine , nutrition and integrative cancer care here in the U.S., but I felt a need to learn more and to reach out more.

“So twelve years ago, Dr. Susan Lord and I went to Mozambique to meet child soldiers and find out what they had to teach us. I wanted to know how anyone could go through what they had been through and still be human. We spent time in Mozambique with the child soldiers, and in South Africa with people traumatized by the violence of apartheid, seeing that mind-body approaches could be helpful. Susan and I then decided to bring our program to Bosnia, and later to Kosovo.

“When we first entered Kosovo it was during the war. We didn’t know anybody. Hundreds of thousands of people had been driven out of their homes. There was shooting in the streets, and people were threatening to kill us. We were just there, seeing if we could be helpful. Now, some eight years later, the work of our international faculty and our Kosovo leadership team has helped transform the entire country’s system of mental health and psychosocial care. Our mind-body approaches are being used throughout the community mental health centers, as well as in the medical school and main hospital. It’s the first national program of integrative medicine I know of.”

Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, is credited with being one of the earliest pioneers in the mind-body holistic health movement and the first to recognize the role of the spirit in health and the recovery from illness. Having been diagnosed with incurable Crohn’s disease at the age of 15, Remem decided not to give up but to join the fight and, against all odds, become a medical doctor. Today, she is a clinical professor of family and community medicine at the University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine. Remem is co-founder and medical director of the Commonweal Cancer Help program, featured in the Bill Moyers PBS series, Healing and the Mind, and has cared for people with cancer and their families for more than 30 years. Her innovative course for first year medical students, The Healer's Art, is currently taught in more than 60 medical schools nationwide.

“When I was 15 years old, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and I have lived with this chronic illness for more than half a century, Remen said. “My surgeons old me that my life as I had dreamed it was over. Because of this disease, I would have many surgeries and become an invalid. I remember the next ten years as a blur of despair and loneliness and anger. Dark times. But gradually I became aware that my disease had not just changed me physically. Weak though I was, something was growing inside me. Something wordless that was vital and alive and determined and, yes, strong. Something that was a response to the very disease that had stolen my physical health.

“These were early days when most people did not have much awareness or sophistication about the inner world. So there were no words to put to this experience and no one to talk to about it. Even so, I began to wonder about it and had lots of questions. Was something strong growing in other sick people too? Perhaps there was even some way to help it to grow. I began to hope that I could find a way to be whole even though I could not be well. Nothing my doctors told me had suggested this possibility. But when I tried to talk to them about this they looked at me with something close to pity. So I kept my ideas to myself, but I could let them go.

“At 20, against the advice of almost everyone, I began to study medicine and discovered that even here among professional colleagues no one talked about such things. As physicians we were focused on the physical body and our goal was cure. The patient’s experience of their illness was irrelevant, even distracting. Anything that could not be expressed in numbers was seen as unreal and unimportant.

“Back in those days if you were a real professional you did not respond emotionally to the suffering around you. Doctors did not cry, but patients did. And because I was usually the only woman on the medical team my colleagues would often come to get me to deal with patients who become emotional. I went to offer my comfort and discovered people were responding to their disease in ways as unique as their fingerprints. People with the same disease had very different stories. I became awed by these stories, by the many unsuspected strengths, the depths of love and devotion, the courage and heroism that disease evoked in the people we had labeled with only their diagnosis. There was something growing in people, strengths and capacities that we were not mobilizing or even supporting. We believed that if we could not cure people, we could not help them. We had sold ourselves and our patients short.

“There are words now for the sort of experience I had as an adolescent, and have discovered in so many others. Words like “the will to live.” Searching for ways to collaborate with this common experience has become a focus of my career.”

Dean Ornish, MD is the founder, president, and director of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, where he holds the Safeway Chair. He is Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. For the past 28 years, Dr. Ornish has directed clinical research demonstrating, for the first time, that comprehensive lifestyle changes may begin to reverse even severe coronary heart disease, without drugs or surgery. He is the author of five best-selling books, including New York Times’ bestsellers Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease, Eat More, Weigh Less, and Love & Survival. He recently directed the first randomized controlled trial demonstrating that comprehensive lifestyle changes may affect the progression of prostate cancer. Dr. Ornish was recognized as “one of the most interesting people of 1996” by People magazine, featured in the “TIME 100” issue on alternative medicine, and chosen by LIFE magazine as “one of the 50 most influential members of his generation.”

“Many people believe that my work is primarily about nutrition, but it’s really about helping people use the experience of suffering as a doorway and catalyst for transforming their lives for the better,” he said. “I became interested in doing this work out of my own emotional pain. When I was a freshman in college, I became profoundly depressed and suicidal. Then, I was introduced to yoga and meditation through a chance meeting with Swami Satchidananda, who taught me that ‘Nothing can bring you lasting peace and happiness – you have that already until you disturb it. Not being mindful of this, we often run after what we think is going to bring us happiness such as money, power and fame and, in one of the great ironies of life, this may disturb the inner peace and joy we already have.’ This led me to begin making the connection between why I suffered and why, and when I felt good and why.

“In my limited understanding, the purpose of all spiritual practices is to help us become more mindful of how we disturb our inner peace and well-being so that we can make different choices that are joyful and healing. These practices are much more than stress management techniques; they are powerful tools for transformation.

“Awareness is the first step in healing. People often believe that advances in medicine have to be a new drug, laser, or surgical intervention to be powerful – something really high-tech and expensive. They often have a hard time believing that the simple choices that we make in our lives each day – what we eat, how we respond to stress, whether or not we smoke, how much we exercise and the quality of our loving relationships – can make such a powerful difference in our health, our well-being, and our survival, but they often do.

“In our studies, we used the latest in high-tech, expensive, state-of-the-art measures to prove how robust these very simple, low-tech, and low-cost interventions can be. In addition to reversing the progression of coronary heart disease, prostate cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and other chronic diseases, we found that these comprehensive lifestyle changes were cost effective as well as medically effective.”

To learn more about Dr. Ornish’s groundbreaking work visit the Preventive Medicine Research Institute website.

May 1997	Oct. 2005

Andrew Weil, MD needs little introduction to observers who have watched the exponential growth of popularity of integrative medicine. In fact, Dr. Weil is widely credited with introduction of the term “integrative medicine” as a welcomed replacement to “alternative” or “complementary.” He has appeared on the cover of TIME magazine not once, but twice! He is the founder and director of the Program in Integrative Medicine (PIM) at the College of Medicine at University of Arizona, which trains physicians, medical students, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and allied health professionals on the philosophy and practice of integrative medicine. Dr. Weil is a best-selling author and editorial director of DrWeil.com, a leading online resource for healthy living based on the philosophy of integrative medicine. His books include the national bestsellers Spontaneous Healing, 8 Weeks to Optimum Health, Eating Well for Optimum Health, The Healthy Kitchen and Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Physical and Spiritual Well-Being.

“As far back as I can remember I have been interested in consciousness and how the mind interacts with the body, Weil said. “I became interested in hypnosis when I was a teenager, which eventually led me to take a course in medical hypnosis for physicians that was given at Columbia University on Saturdays. It convinced me of the potential for taking advantage of the mind-body connection to facilitate healing, a potential that was mostly ignored in medicine. Mind-body interventions, like hypnosis, guided imagery, biofeedback, and mindfulness training, are inexpensive, safe and effective. If they become part of mainstream medicine, we could see improved outcomes and lower health care costs.

“Of all my accomplishments, I am proudest of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. We are the world leaders in education in this area, and the models we’ve developed for training physicians and allied health professionals are now sought out by many institutions.

“I also feel that I have been true to myself in my life, that I’ve followed my own path. In the early years it was quite lonely, but I knew that I was right and that what I wrote and spoke resonated with many people. Gradually, I got a larger and larger following in the general public, but I was mostly ignored by my medical colleagues for a very long time, probably until 1990. It’s been gratifying to watch the culture catch up. I’ve not changed my message and have been putting out the same basic ideas for more than 30 years. Many innovators, in their lifetimes, do not receive the kind of recognition that I have. For that, I feel very fortunate and very grateful.

To learn more about Dr. Weil’s pioneering work visit his website.

Larry Dossey, MD graduated with honors from the University of Texas and worked as a pharmacist while earning his M.D. degree from Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. Before completing his residency in internal medicine, he served as a battalion surgeon in Vietnam, where he was decorated for valor. He became interested in biofeedback in the early 1970s as a possible treatment for his chronic migraine headaches, and traveled extensively to learn all about its possible use in medicine. He co-founded one of the first medical journals in the field of integrative medicine, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, and is currently executive editor of EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing. The impact of Dr. Dossey's work has been remarkable. Before his book Healing Words was published in 1993, only three U.S. medical schools had courses devoted to exploring the role of religious practice and prayer in health. Today, nearly 80 medical schools have instituted such courses, many of which utilize Dr. Dossey's works as textbooks. In his 1989 book, Recovering the Soul, he introduced the concept of "nonlocal mind" – mind unconfined to the brain and body, mind spread infinitely throughout space and time. Since then, "nonlocal mind" has been adopted by many leading scientists as an emerging image of consciousness.

“From eighth grade on, I suffered from severe, classical migraine headaches, including pain, nausea, vomiting and incapacitation, as well as blindness,” Dossey said. “I could not see and I could not function. The condition grew worse during medical school under the stress of training, and by the time I finished my medical post-graduate training, the migraines were so bad that I thought I might not be able to pursue my career.

“Then in the early 1970s, biofeedback burst upon the medical scene out of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. I chased all over the country trying to learn how to be a biofeedback subject. It was like someone turned a switch in my head. The migraines went almost completely away. It salvaged my career, and opened my consciousness to the whole realm of complementary medicine, which in those days was a term that didn’t even exist.

“I can’t date the beginning of my interest in consciousness and spirituality. It just seemed obvious that one could not help sick people without calling attention to emotions, attitudes, worldviews, and spirituality.

“One of the things of which I’m most proud is being part of a movement that has helped to redefine the nature of consciousness. Back when I was in medical school, consciousness was largely viewed as simply a byproduct of the brain. We said that the brain made consciousness like the liver secreted bile. The “C” word was virtually banned in medical schools, and one did not talk in polite academic circles about consciousness. Now, we’re agonizing our way toward a new view of consciousness in which consciousness appears to be unconfined to specific brains and bodies and unlimited in space and time.

“I’m a firm believer in the pendulum theory of history. In medicine it swung toward the physical about as far as it can go. Now the pendulum is coming back, and it’s going to swing even further in the direction of integrative medicine and toward the virtues of consciousness. Our challenge is to prevent it swinging so wildly in that direction that we give up the best of conventional medicine. We don’t want to give up the best of conventional medicine. We want to harmonize both. We want to stabilize the pendulum somewhere in midswing so that we can have the best of both worlds.

To learn more about Dr. Dossey’s pioneering work visit his website.

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