Friday
Then: Mushrooms & Tibetan Bowls
Early in 2002, prior to my surgery, although Dr. Bill Utz and my doctors at Mayo Clinic exuded worldclass medicine, still I felt something was missing. No one was talking about why I got the disease or how my body was -- or was not -- trying to keep it in check.
Dr. Bridget Duffy, a colleague Carla’s at Medtronic at the time, had the enviable role of trying to take a huge medical device company like Medtronic into the new world of integrated medicine looking at spirit, mind and then body. Bridget was happy to arrange for Carla and me to talk to well-known author and TV celebrity Dr. Dean Ornish in San Francisco and to visit Dr. Mitch Gaynor in New York.
A message about the star power of Dr. Dean. Celebrity has turned him into an officious jerk, at least in our interaction with him. With every reason to treat us respectfully because he was seeking Medtronic funding, Ornish wasn’t there for three scheduled calls. When we finally reached him, there were no apologies, and his attitude was that he didn’t want to do this, but he had to, and we were like a faceless call-in poor soul on a radio talk show he was doing just to sell books. I knew I hated the guy when, after telling him my condition, he quickly said: “Why have the surgery if it’s already broken outside the prostate. Surgery won’t help.”
Dr. Mitch Gaynor, a good friend of Bridget’s, was another matter.
Through Bridget Duffy, Carla and I had a chance to go to New York and spend nearly four hours with Dr. Mitch Gaynor, an oncologist then at the Cornell Medical School, and one of the leading proponents of nutritional supplements and guided imagery in a cancer-fighting regimen.
If interested, read sample pages and reviews of his books Dr. Gaynor's Cancer Prevention Program and Healing Essence at Amazon.com and look for his guided imagery meditation CDs. This chap is a gem, a late-30’s Texan who every week in Manhattan gathers cancer patients, medical students and others and leads them through practices such as listening to Tibetan bowls for healing power.
Mitch Gaynor treated us like his most special patient. Surprisingly, he started the session by asking about my family history, and the pain of a contentious split from my mother while in college and no reconciliation prior to her death really caught his attention. He is certain that cancer appears due to these psychic scars, and that nutrition, supplements, and guided imagery, along with the best of traditional medicine, are the only way to fight the battle.
The last hour of our time with Mitch, he prescribed an amazing and extensive regimen of nutritional supplements and guided imagery with his CDs. And he insisted that I come back to New York for some four-day sessions of healing with a group he supports. I just couldn’t see doing that, and finding healer Jon MacRae as the alternative gave me the comfort I was mostly following Mitch’s advice.
It’s still comforting to me that Mitch prescribed so many supplements to be taken so often, with juicing and with mixing awful green powdered seaweed, shark liver oil, and grass and mushroom extracts. This regimen became my time-filling ‘job’ leading up to surgery. I bought a rolling cart with drawers and cabinets to hold the juicer and pill dispensers and set up shop as Kim’s Apothecary in our mud room. Thanks to Mitch, I was – and am – able to buy these very expensive supplements from a wholesaler in California – Scientific Biologics – where Stephanie there always stays current on my progress and reminds me that they sell direct only to Mitch’s patients.
For those of you not familiar with guided imagery, it is simply guided meditation. With soothing, healing musical backdrops, or sounds like the drumming of Tibetan metal bowls and chanting, a speaker, like Mitch Gaynor on the CD title Sounds of Healing, tells listeners to concentrate on words or imagine healing beams moving within the body.
I’ll admit: I never was able to conjure up the mind pictures suggested by Doctor Gaynor when listening to Sounds of Healing, but that didn’t stop me from becoming hooked on it. I simply couldn’t get clear mind pictures of things Gaynor was suggesting to imagine, like energy moving up the body and out the top of my head. Besides, I had an alternative auto-visualization tool in my arsenal under the hands of healer Jon MacRae. But, I listened religiously to Sounds of Healing, taking great comfort in the process, at least four hours a day the 10 days before surgery, and pretty much constantly the day before and the morning of surgery.
And I’m amused by another audience for the title. Later that summer, my daughter Jessie borrowed the CD player to take to summer camp, and the first night she pulled out Sounds of Healing, still in the CD player, to play on the cabin’s boombox. Initially these 12 year old girls giggled at the bizarre sounds of whacking on metals bowls and a doctor’s voice imploring them to concentrate on the words RAAAA, and WAAAA, and LAAA and so one. But then they fell asleep to it and it became their bedtime anthem the rest of camp. ¶ 1:10 PM
Dr. Bridget Duffy, a colleague Carla’s at Medtronic at the time, had the enviable role of trying to take a huge medical device company like Medtronic into the new world of integrated medicine looking at spirit, mind and then body. Bridget was happy to arrange for Carla and me to talk to well-known author and TV celebrity Dr. Dean Ornish in San Francisco and to visit Dr. Mitch Gaynor in New York.
A message about the star power of Dr. Dean. Celebrity has turned him into an officious jerk, at least in our interaction with him. With every reason to treat us respectfully because he was seeking Medtronic funding, Ornish wasn’t there for three scheduled calls. When we finally reached him, there were no apologies, and his attitude was that he didn’t want to do this, but he had to, and we were like a faceless call-in poor soul on a radio talk show he was doing just to sell books. I knew I hated the guy when, after telling him my condition, he quickly said: “Why have the surgery if it’s already broken outside the prostate. Surgery won’t help.”
Dr. Mitch Gaynor, a good friend of Bridget’s, was another matter.
Through Bridget Duffy, Carla and I had a chance to go to New York and spend nearly four hours with Dr. Mitch Gaynor, an oncologist then at the Cornell Medical School, and one of the leading proponents of nutritional supplements and guided imagery in a cancer-fighting regimen.
If interested, read sample pages and reviews of his books Dr. Gaynor's Cancer Prevention Program and Healing Essence at Amazon.com and look for his guided imagery meditation CDs. This chap is a gem, a late-30’s Texan who every week in Manhattan gathers cancer patients, medical students and others and leads them through practices such as listening to Tibetan bowls for healing power.
Mitch Gaynor treated us like his most special patient. Surprisingly, he started the session by asking about my family history, and the pain of a contentious split from my mother while in college and no reconciliation prior to her death really caught his attention. He is certain that cancer appears due to these psychic scars, and that nutrition, supplements, and guided imagery, along with the best of traditional medicine, are the only way to fight the battle.
The last hour of our time with Mitch, he prescribed an amazing and extensive regimen of nutritional supplements and guided imagery with his CDs. And he insisted that I come back to New York for some four-day sessions of healing with a group he supports. I just couldn’t see doing that, and finding healer Jon MacRae as the alternative gave me the comfort I was mostly following Mitch’s advice.
It’s still comforting to me that Mitch prescribed so many supplements to be taken so often, with juicing and with mixing awful green powdered seaweed, shark liver oil, and grass and mushroom extracts. This regimen became my time-filling ‘job’ leading up to surgery. I bought a rolling cart with drawers and cabinets to hold the juicer and pill dispensers and set up shop as Kim’s Apothecary in our mud room. Thanks to Mitch, I was – and am – able to buy these very expensive supplements from a wholesaler in California – Scientific Biologics – where Stephanie there always stays current on my progress and reminds me that they sell direct only to Mitch’s patients.
For those of you not familiar with guided imagery, it is simply guided meditation. With soothing, healing musical backdrops, or sounds like the drumming of Tibetan metal bowls and chanting, a speaker, like Mitch Gaynor on the CD title Sounds of Healing, tells listeners to concentrate on words or imagine healing beams moving within the body.
I’ll admit: I never was able to conjure up the mind pictures suggested by Doctor Gaynor when listening to Sounds of Healing, but that didn’t stop me from becoming hooked on it. I simply couldn’t get clear mind pictures of things Gaynor was suggesting to imagine, like energy moving up the body and out the top of my head. Besides, I had an alternative auto-visualization tool in my arsenal under the hands of healer Jon MacRae. But, I listened religiously to Sounds of Healing, taking great comfort in the process, at least four hours a day the 10 days before surgery, and pretty much constantly the day before and the morning of surgery.
And I’m amused by another audience for the title. Later that summer, my daughter Jessie borrowed the CD player to take to summer camp, and the first night she pulled out Sounds of Healing, still in the CD player, to play on the cabin’s boombox. Initially these 12 year old girls giggled at the bizarre sounds of whacking on metals bowls and a doctor’s voice imploring them to concentrate on the words RAAAA, and WAAAA, and LAAA and so one. But then they fell asleep to it and it became their bedtime anthem the rest of camp. ¶ 1:10 PM
