Volume 3, Issue 4 , Pages 357-361, July 2007
Mind-Body Training Offers Hope and Help to the Gulf Coast
Article Outline
- Holistic Nursing Achieves ANA Specialty Status
- Survey Points to the Need to Rethink Hospital Food
- Charles Taylor Awarded Templeton Prize for Discoveries About Spiritual Realties
- Drugmakers Spend Record Amounts to Influence Congress
- Continuum Center Launches CME Program
- Occupational Medicine Online Library Now Available
- Biography
- Copyright
While some people are still debating the power of the mind to heal, James Gordon, MD, is putting this innate ability to good use by training people living in war-torn countries and locales devastated by natural disasters to help themselves by engaging the mind-body connection. He has successfully worked with inner-city youth in Washington DC, with people living in the Gaza Strip, Israel and in Kosovo, with veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the 9-11 firefighters in New York City. Now, he and his team are working in New Orleans.
In addition to being deeply traumatized by the unprecedented destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and the consequent failure of the levees, the people of New Orleans are also contending with economic devastation, an array of frustrating bureaucratic obstacles, escalating crime, the ongoing departure of family members and friends, and a growing uncertainty about the future. Aside from being both physically and mentally harmful, the resulting depression, anxiety, and soaring stress levels can compound the problem by trapping people in disempowered states. But Dr Gordon, who is the founder and director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM), intends to change that with his program, New Orleans Hope.
The 18-month-long pilot, which is now in progress, is a collaboration between CMBM and a number of local organizations that are serving the traumatized population. It is free to local people through monies Dr Gordon is raising from individuals and foundations.
New Orleans Hope is based on the CMBM model of taking an individualized approach to self-awareness, self-expression, and self-care. The program makes use of a wide variety of scientifically proven techniques for stress management and self-understanding, including mind-body approaches (meditation, guided imagery, and biofeedback), techniques for expressing emotions (drawing, movement, and dialogue), and group support. But most importantly, the approach is educational rather than medical. Participants are treated as students instead of patients, and the work focuses on people’s strengths and capacity for self-reliance and optimism rather than past trauma.
The protocol used by the Center for Mind Body Medicine includes a variety of mind-body interventions, self-expression exercises, meditations, and breathing regimens. The techniques are designed to balance the flight or fight and stress responses, enhance production of hormones like serotonin that can improve mood, and decrease the production of other hormones such as cortisol that increase blood pressure and blood sugar levels. They also help reconnect the individual to his or her own inner resources. “It is medicine that asks all people to become actively engaged in their own care and to help themselves,” explained Gordon.
Listed here are some of the therapeutic interventions used in the training.
Soft Belly Breathing
This slow, deep breathing exercise invokes the parasympathetic nervous system. Participants are instructed to close their eyes and breathe in through the nose (saying “soft”) and out through the mouth (saying “belly”), relaxing the belly in the process. “Breathing is inseparable from life” said Gordon, “and if used consciously, is central to relaxation.”
Biofeedback
Temperature biofeedback is used in the small groups to demonstrate how the mind-body connection works and that each person can positively affect it. Thermisters that provide digital readouts of skin temperatures are attached to the participants’ index fingers, and they put a temperature sensitive biodot on one hand. When a person is in fight or flight mode, the blood rushes towards the large muscles and away from the digestive system and skin. Consequently muscles tense, appetite decreases, and skin temperatures drop. As a person relaxes, skin temperature will rise. The thermister readings rise when the students engage in relaxation exercises, and the biodot changes from brown or yellow to green, blue, and purple.
Self-expression
Using drawing as a means of self-expression enables people to articulate and release deeply felt emotions, as well as tap into their subconscious or intuitive minds for help in a more creative way than simply talking about the problems. Participants are asked in the first small group meeting to make three drawings— themselves, themselves with their biggest problem, and themselves with the problem solved. After the drawings are finished, each person shares with the group the meaning of the drawings and the feelings and thoughts connected to the images. This gives them insights into what is troubling them and hope that problems can be solved.
Guided Imagery
Guided imagery processes enable people to access their own innate wisdom and strength. The group leader instructs the participants to close their eyes and imagine being in a safe place. When a calm pervades the room, participants are asked to allow a helper or guide to appear to them. This helper can take the form of a man or woman, an animal, or a creature or god or goddess from mythology. The participants are then instructed to ask their guides for help. The guides will often offer remarkable, healing advice—words and images that come from the unconscious—that was heretofore not available to the participant.
Shaking and Dancing
This active meditation—five to 10 minutes of shaking the whole body and five to 10 more of free dance to fast music—raises energy, lowers stress, and gives people who have felt constricted and traumatized a sense of relaxation and freedom.
Meditative Group Support
The group sessions are not therapy sessions in which behavior is interpreted and analyzed. Instead, the students are taught to be present in the moment, to listen without judgment, and to be self-aware, noticing the thoughts and feelings that are arising with themselves. This witnessing creates a safe space for people to explore their own depths and to communicate to others openly and honestly. It facilitates openness and acceptance among participants.
In the initial developmental phase, CMBM staff and its local liaisons—including Kevin Stephens, MD, MPH, Head of the New Orleans Health Department—identified potential participants for the training program. They concentrated on finding people who were degreed clinicians already working locally who could be team leaders and supervisors.
The first six-day training—which took place January 2007 in New Orleans and involved 43 participants—taught the clinicians how to deal with their own stress and trauma as well as equipping them to work with their clientele. These participants are now recruiting 100 more leaders while CMBM raises the funds to train them. CMBM senior faculty is providing ongoing supervision to these participants as they return to their communities and begin to work with traumatized populations. An advanced training and practicum, scheduled to take place in the fall of 2007, will teach all 140 participants how to use the CMBM approach in small groups throughout the New Orleans area. The final phase of the program will provide leadership training for 30 of the participants so the work can continue to expand without CMBM presence.
New Orleans residents are suffering from the effects of extreme ongoing chronic stress with unpredictable exacerbations of acute stress. Unfortunately, the allopathic healthcare system addresses symptoms only after they occur, as it does not focus on the biopsychosocial milieu of the patient. But when the stressors that drive the emergence of physical symptoms remain untreated, patients can lose control of hypertension and diabetes, succumb to myocardial infarction, experience increased allergies and infections, lose sleep, have schizophrenia revealed, and die prematurely.
Kevin Stephens, MD, director of the City of New Orleans Health Department, recognized the insidious nature of stress as both a cause of new morbidity and a contributor to existing morbidity and overall mortality. During the Center for Mind Body Medicine’s phase I training in New Orleans, Dr Stephens went on the air on WWL-TV and committed New Orleans to the path of holism.
Dr Henri Roca, a member of the American Holistic Medical Association (AHMA), is serving as colead for the Center for Mind Body Medicine’s program in New Orleans. In addition to this service, the AHMA has agreed to support providers in the program with onsite mentors and phone-based consultants. This dual approach will provide community resources as well as clinical experience in the identification of stress-mediated illness and overall stress reaction modification.
After the initial training, participants are able to use the approaches and techniques on themselves and their families and to begin to integrate the CMBM model into their ongoing work. When the advanced training is complete, participants are capable of offering CMBM’s full group and individual program to large numbers of traumatized children and adults.
James Gordon, MD, (standing, right) with the first group of trainees in New Orleans during one of the experiential activities.
James Gordon, MD
Dr Gordon estimates that within a year after the training, the first 140 participants will have worked intensively with approximately 15,000 of the most traumatized children and adults, most of who would not have otherwise sought out, or received, help. “The program will give these traumatized and chronically stressed people the practical tools they need to help themselves and one another and inspire them to together repair the frayed fabric of their community,” he said.
According to posttraining survey results, the participants experienced a marked decrease in levels of stress, a greatly enhanced belief in their ability to effect positive change in those they serve, an increased sense of connection to one another, and a greater hope for the recovery of their community.
“We have been steeping in grief, loss and trauma,” said Mindy Milam, MSW, a private practitioner in New Orleans. “Many of us are stuck in those places. But the CMBM training provided me with a path out and with a compass to guide others out of despair and helplessness.”
Nancy Freeman, LCSW, director of the Institute of Mental Hygiene in New Orleans, concurs. “Dr Gordon offers an array of scientifically proven strategies for addressing and reducing stress and for connecting with our internal capacity for healing and rejuvenation,” she said. “In just a few days, I experienced increased energy, focus, and calmness. I am especially excited about the possibility of using this work with children to help them deal with their loss and ongoing stress.”
Another clinician in the training program, R. Noah Morris, BA, EMT-B, the cofounder/director of Common Ground Health Clinic in New Orleans, put it this way: “The entire city as well as all the relief workers are overstressed and traumatized. The CMBM training helps not just New Orleans but this whole region on its path to becoming whole again… this is some of the strongest healing work I have ever seen.”
When asked why he believes the training produces such positive effects, Dr Gordon explained that, “creating a safe place for people to communicate and treating them as self-reliant and empowered students and not as patients are two of the key components. In addition to teaching them how to reduce their own stress and anxiety, we also show them how to use their imagination and intuition to create solutions to problems that before had seemed insoluble.”
For more information about Dr James Gordon or the CMBM and its programs, please visit http://www.cmbm.org.
Holistic Nursing Achieves ANA Specialty Status
The profession of holistic nursing is now officially recognized by the American Nurses Association (ANA) as a nursing specialty with a defined scope and standards of practice.
The American Holistic Nurses Association (AHNA), a nonprofit support organization for nurses and holistic healthcare professionals, applied for specialty approval with a 76-page document that described holistic nursing as a focused area of nursing practice. American Holistic Nurses Association President Carla Mariano, EdD, AHN-BC, FAAIM, states that, “This is a phenomenal step forward and a very special achievement for holistic nursing. Having holistic nursing recognized as a specialty gives us legitimacy and authority within the mainstream of our profession and credibility in the eyes of the healthcare world. It also acknowledges our unique contribution to the health and healing of people and society.”
Holistic nursing is a specialty practiced nationwide that is based on a body of knowledge, evidence-based research, sophisticated skill sets, defined standards of practice, and a philosophy of living and being that is grounded in caring, relationship, and interconnectedness. Obtaining specialty status means that clients/patients now have the assurance that any person practicing holistic nursing as a specialty must hold a license as a registered nurse from a state board of nursing.
“Achieving specialty status will have major implications for the future of holistic nursing and the AHNA,” states Jeanne Crawford, AHNA’s executive director. In addition to legitimacy and authority, specialty status provides holistic nurses with clarity and a foundation for their practice, strengthening the voice of the entire profession and allowing clients/patients to trust that they will receive quality care that facilitates health and healing of the whole person.
The AHNA will copublish Holistic Nursing: Scope and Standards of Practice with the ANA. The book will be available for purchase through ANA and the AHNA online bookstore in the summer of 2007. It will serve as an essential resource for nurses and others in related healthcare work, including care providers, educators, researchers and administrators, and those involved in funding, legal, policy, and regulatory activities.
Jeanne Crawford, AHNA Executive Director
For more information, contact the American Holistic Nurses Association, 323 N. San Francisco Street, Suite 201, Flagstaff, AZ 86001; telephone (800) 278-2462; or visit their Web site at http://www.ahna.org.
Survey Points to the Need to Rethink Hospital Food
Despite the research demonstrating that fast food may contribute to poor health and is a source of unneeded calories and unhealthy fats, almost half of the hospitals in the United States continue to serve fast food in their cafeterias, and some hospitals even host a fast food franchise on-site.
Lenard I. Lesser, MD, conducted a survey and then published a research letter in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine (2006;19:526-527) in which he revealed that 42% of the academically affiliated hospitals surveyed served at least one brand name fast food (BNFF) on their campuses. The most popular brands were Krispy Kreme, SUBWAY, Burger King, McDonald’s, Au Bon Pain, and Pizza Hut.
Survey responses were received from 113 of the 125 medical schools in the study (90% response rate) and represented 233 affiliated hospitals/medical centers. According to the published results, there were 163 occurrences of BNFF served on hospital grounds, because many hospitals had more than one type. One hundred thirty-five hospitals (58%) had no BNFF establishments on campus; 65 (28%) hospitals had one BNFF; 15 (6%) had two on their campus; and eighteen hospitals (7%) had three or more. Sixty-three percent (63%) of the medical schools surveyed had at least one affiliated teaching hospital/medical center that served BNFF.
“Administrators at teaching hospitals should continue to consider whether the food they serve on their campuses is consistent with the mission of improving the health of their communities,” advised Lesser.
Charles Taylor Awarded Templeton Prize for Discoveries About Spiritual Realties
Professor Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher who proposes that problems such as violence and bigotry can only be solved by considering both their secular and spiritual dimensions, has won the 2007 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities.
The prize is a cornerstone of the foundation’s international efforts to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life’s biggest questions, ranging from explorations into the laws of nature and the universe to questions on love, gratitude, forgiveness, and creativity. Created by global investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton, the prize is valued at £800,000 (more than $1.5 million). The Templeton Prize is the world’s largest annual monetary award given to an individual. Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, officially awarded the prize to Taylor at a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday, May 2.
For more than 45 years, Taylor, 75, has argued that depending on secularized viewpoints alone leads to fragmented, faulty results. The author of more than a dozen books and scores of published essays, Taylor is currently professor of law and philosophy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and professor emeritus in the Philosophy Department at McGill University in Montréal. A Rhodes scholar, he holds a bachelor of arts from McGill University and Balliol College at Oxford University, as well as a masters and a doctorate (DPhil) from Oxford. He is the first Canadian to win the Templeton Prize.
“Throughout his career, Charles Taylor has staked an often lonely position that insists on the inclusion of spiritual dimensions in discussions of public policy, history, linguistics, literature, and every other facet of humanities and the social sciences,” says John M. Templeton, Jr, MD, the foundation’s president. “Through careful analysis, impeccable scholarship, and powerful, passionate language, he has given us bold new insights that provide a fresh understanding of the many problems of the world and, potentially, how we might together resolve them.”
Drugmakers Spend Record Amounts to Influence Congress
Drugmakers spent $155 million lobbying Congress between January 2005 and June 2006, trying to influence legislation on Medicare, drug importation, and patent protection, according to a new study by The Center for Public Integrity.
The drug industry trade group, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, spent more than $18 million on lobbying during the 18-month period covered by the study. It was the largest amount the group has spent in any given year since the Center for Public Integrity began analyzing the data in 1998. Pfizer, whose lobbying expenditures reached $12 million in 2005 and the first half of 2006, spent the most of any one single company. Other big spenders were Merck, Eli Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and GlaxoSmithKline.
The amount the drug industry spends on lobbying is “staggering” and exposes the major influence and power the industry has on legislation, Consumers Union senior policy analyst Bill Vaughan said.
To read the complete record, go to: http://www.publicintegrity.org/rx/report.aspx?aid=823.
Continuum Center Launches CME Program
The Continuum Center for Health and Healing recently launched its first online CME course on irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), as part of an online professional educational initiative in digestive disorders. The course offers a biopsychosocial, multidisciplinary experience of diagnosis and treatment and features a video case conference during which the integrative approach to IBS is discussed by a physician, acupuncturist, nutritionist, and psychologist.
“This latest addition to the online education effort in integrative medicine focuses on the integrative approach to a specific health condition. It features a video case conference of a multidisciplinary discussion on the treatment of IBS from different therapeutic perspectives and schools of medicine. Also featured are short individual sessions by the acupuncturist, nutritionist and psychologist relevant to the treatment of IBS,” says Marsha J. Handel, MLS, the director of informatics and online education for the Continuum Center for Health and Healing.
The course is available to everyone via the center’s Web site at www.healthandhealingny.org (last red button on the right) and can be taken for 3 CME credits at a cost of $25.00.
Occupational Medicine Online Library Now Available
More than 450 research reports, covering topics such as ergonomic risks, the health effects of dust and chemicals, lifting and back pain, risks from asbestos, and fatigue syndromes are now available for free from the Institute of Occupational Medicine (IOM) Web site at http://www.iom-world.org/research/libraryentry.php.
Registration with the IOM online library, which is free, gives access to the institute’s research reports from 1969 to the present. The database allows healthcare providers to search by author, subject, and key words.
The IOM was founded as a charity in 1969 by the UK coal industry in conjunction with the University of Edinburgh. It became an independent organization in 1990. Its mission is to benefit those at work and in the community by providing quality research, consultancy and training in health, hygiene, and safety, and to maintain its independent position as an international center of excellence. The IOM advises and researches on the health aspects of dusts, asbestos, air pollution, chemicals, manual handling, and stress.
For further information please contact Ken Dixon via e-mail at: ken.dixon@iom-world.org.
Matters of Note is written and compiled by Bonnie J. Horrigan, editorial director for EXPLORE and author of Voices in Integrative Medicine: Conversations and Encounters (Elsevier 2003).
PII: S1550-8307(07)00148-6
doi:10.1016/j.explore.2007.05.002
© 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Refers to erratum:
- Errata
Volume 3, Issue 4 , Pages 357-361, July 2007