NEW YORK -- Fashion is the last thing on Donna Karan's mind at the moment. When she says the designer's role is "not only to dress people but to address them as well," it is clear she will not be chatting about her latest wardrobe creations.
A longtime practitioner of yoga and meditation, she has contributed $850,000 to the Beth Israel Medical Center to bring yoga therapy and a new kind of caregiving to the cancer wing. Sitting in her Urban Zen studio on Greenwich Street and sipping a bottle of green vegetable and fruit juice, Karan launches into a personal -- and at times teary -- monologue about how she hopes to make a difference.
"I think the medical system right now is so specialized, the old GP is missing -- the general practitioner who looks at the total person," she says.
That total person, she says, needs both the science from the Western world and healing and alternative medicines from the Eastern culture. The latter was absent when her husband died from lung cancer in 2001 and her best friend succumbed to brain cancer last September. Her grant to Beth Israel, called the Urban Zen Initiative, provides cancer patients another caregiver to stand alongside the doctors and nurses.
High hopes for the research
Called "integrative therapists," they teach easy yoga poses and breathing techniques, most of which are done in bed and are designed to help ease patient discomfort from surgeries, treatments and anxiety. They also offer patients meditative tapes during treatments, help them access all levels of care and reach out to family members.
Karan believes the research attached to the one-year grant will show that hospital stays can be shortened and fewer anxiety drugs administered, which would save the patient and insurance companies money.
"If this is something we're going to go out and convince hospitals around the country to replicate, we have to be able to show it saves money in the long run or at least is cost-neutral and you end up with happier patients," says Benjamin Killer, director of the research.
Not everyone sees a need
But there are skeptics. David Gorski, an oncologist and associate professor at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, does not see a need for integrative therapists and does not believe many hospitals could hire them, anyway.
"If an 'alternative' medical treatment is found by science to be useful, physicians will happily integrate it into scientific medicine, and it will then be just 'medicine,' " Gorski says.
Karan disagrees. "The nurses and doctors are too busy. We need to think outside the box and find ways to effectively change the medical system."
One change would be to prevent anyone else from having to hear what doctors told her during the treatment of her husband, Stephan Weiss.
"They said, 'We've taken you as far as we can go.' I said, 'That is unacceptable. No, no, no, no. We're going to fight this to the last thing.' "
They changed oncologists, and her husband started doing yoga and breathing exercises.
Yoga helped Weiss expand his chest and lungs and breathe easier. He flew his plane and attended shows aided by a tank of oxygen until he died at age 62.
Karan, 60, started yoga and meditation when she was 18.
"I found that the mat was that place where I can find my serenity and my calm." She says she practices daily for an hour in the morning at home.
When her friend and former model Lynn Kohlman was diagnosed with breast cancer, Karan introduced her to yoga. Kohlman practiced regularly with Karan, even after she developed brain cancer and was given four months to live. She lived 5 1/2 years.
"After the brain surgery, the doctors said they had never found someone who had been able to be so calm. She found her inner strength," Karan says.
"It was sheer perfection."
Karan says she has raised money over the years for various diseases. "But this is different. This is about the optimal caring of the patient and the loved ones."
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