Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine
Volume 2, Number 4
July 1996
By Nancy G. Moore


Body, Mind, Heart, and Spirit: A New Paradigm of Cancer Care

The Geffen Cancer Center and Research Institute uses the latest technology to treat cancer and blood disorders. However, the staff's philosophy of healing is aimed at real transformation of the patient at the deepest levels of the body, mind, heart and spirit.

According to founder and executive director Jeremy R. Geffen, MD, FACP, that transformation begins with an intention. "My staff and I have created an environment where our clear intention is that when people walk through the door, or when they call on the phone, they will immediately begin to experience the feeling of being embraced and cared for in a way they've never known before.

"Then, in that context we go about very gently and very professionally evaluating and treating their medical problems," he explains. A cancer patient would not be as open to exploring complementary approaches to healing with him if they were uncertain about his foundation in the sciences, says Geffen, a university-trained board-certified medical oncologist.

"The first thing that a person with cancer and their family members need is to experience love and caring, and then immediately after that they must feel and experience a sense of competency," he says. This feeling is at an unconscious level. "People either feel certain that you know what you're talking about, or they question it, and if they question it, it is much harder for the healing process to occur at a deep level.

Dr. Geffen, the only MD on the 12 person medical team, says that many cancer patients throughout the country hear about him through word of mouth because they're interested in going beyond the medical paradigm. They don't want to forfeit the benefits of medical knowledge, but they know there is more than chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery and they don't know where to find it in their hometowns.

"We spend a lot of time talking about the mind-body connection, and really delving into very important questions about their beliefs and thoughts, who they believe themselves to be, the meaning and purpose of their lives, how all this is affecting their moment-to-moment experience of life, what their goals and values are, and what meaning they give to their illness and to their treatment," says Dr. Geffen. And then he's ready to explore what will support them in moving forward on a truly comprehensive healing journey.

Dr. Geffen's orientation in suggesting complementary therapy is primarily as an adjunct to conventional treatment, with the aim of helping patients discover and enhance their own inner healing mechanisms. He has found no magic cancer cure in herbal remedies, but he may suggest herbs to aid sleep or digestion, or to enhance a patient's nutritional status. He relies on conventional medicine for treating the cancer, and looks to nutrition, counseling, psychotherapy, massage therapy, meditation, yoga, journaling, prayer, and visualization for treating the other components.

Dr. Geffen looks at people from a spiritual perspective. "I tend to see humans as spiritual beings first and physical beings second," he says. "For many people, cancer is the one event that powerfully awakens them out of the complacency of their lives, and gives them an extraordinary opportunity to redirect their focus away from the purely material aspects of life. It offers them a profound opportunity to go beyond the experience of isolation and separateness that so many people tend to live with, and to go beyond the habitual identification of one's self as a body and a mind rather than as spirit. I'm not saying at all that it is a great thing to get cancer, but I must say that for many people it is the one thing that motivates them more powerfully than anything else to deeply reevaluate who they are, and what their lives are really all about."

Geffen recommends that new patients join an ongoing support group the first or second day they're at the cancer center. A staff social worker leads support groups and sees patients on an individual basis. Mediation also is encouraged, and Geffen and his staff meditate together regularly before their weekly staff meeting, which he says is one of the highlights of their week. "We go into our hearts and into the silence together, and we connect with what's most important to us. We're constantly asking those kinds of questions of ourselves and each other," he says, "so it's very natural for my whole staff to know just how to support someone in a way that moves them forward very gently and very effectively."

The 6000-square-foot cancer center, located in Vero Beach -- on the eastern coast of central Florida -- includes a high-tech medical laboratory, examination rooms, a peaceful chemotherapy room, a massage therapy center, a yoga and meditation room, and an educational/spiritual bookstore. It currently is an outpatient center, across the street from the 300-bed Indian River Memorial Hospital, where Geffen is a staff physician.

Geffen's vision is for the center, which opened in October 1994, eventually to become like a retreat, where patients could stay for a period of weeks or months. During that time, they'll have a full schedule of medical treatment, highly nutritious meals, nutrition counseling and cooking classes, group therapy, massage, yoga meditation, and other quiet time -- along with classes and programs designed to help them redefine and redirect their lives physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

He also wants the center to be a training ground for other health professionals who lack the skills in integrating body, mind, heart, and spirit. "We created the cancer center explicitly and intentionally as a model of exactly how medicine and healthcare look when the true aim and purpose is to help patients, their loved ones, and staff members to consistently experience deeper and deeper levels of love and joy in all aspects of their lives, and ultimately to know that the love and joy that we are all seeking is the essence of who we really are," Geffen says.

State-of-the-art conventional medical care clearly forms the basis of treatment at the center. However, patients can then participate in a seven-level program, which serves as a comprehensive roadmap on the healing journey for the body, mind, heart, and spirit. The seven levels are (1) education and information, (2) psychosocial support, (3) the body as a garden to improve the quality of life, (4) emotional healing, (5) the nature of mind, (6) life assessment, and (7) the nature of spirit.

The seven levels were born out of Geffen's own years of searching and asking, "How can I find real and lasting love, joy, and peace within myself? How can I help others find this as well? What does it really take to promote awareness, healing, and transformation at the deepest levels of a human being -- particularly in someone with cancer? How can one support oneself and others to discover and experience that place within each of us where we are not only connected as human beings, but where we are the same being; that infinite ocean of love and awareness from which all of creation arises?"

Geffen's own spiritual journey began at college age, when he postponed his education to live for 4 years in an ashram (spiritual community) to learn about Hinduism and Buddhism, cleansing the body through diet, and the power of meditation and yoga to quiet the mind. It was an experience with his father's cancer, however, while Geffen was in the final year of medical school, that planted the seed for the cancer center.

His father died within 4 months of being diagnosed with widely metastatic gastric cancer, but during that time Geffen used all his resources to examine both Western and Eastern approaches to treatment. What he found was good intention from both paradigms, but a shocking bigotry from either side to try to integrate the two.

"With tremendous respect and gratitude for the oncologists who took care of him, I must say that, beyond focusing on his medical problems, there was no real help offered about what my father could do to ease the tremendous personal upheaval he was going through," says Geffen. "He was swimming in an ocean of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pain and turmoil. At the age of 60, he had everything to live for, and suddenly, literally with a 1-week period, he was found to have blood in his stools, and his stomach was removed so he could no longer eat or swallow without great difficulty. His whole life was flipped upside down, as was my life and the lives of everyone who knew and loved him."

Geffen was familiar with a variety of holistic approaches to medicine and healing because he also had traveled to Indian, Nepal, and Tibet to study Tibetan and Ayurvedic medicine. "I knew the power of holistic medicine, and I knew the power of meditation. I knew there was so much more that could potentially be done for him in terms of supporting him nutritionally, supporting his immune system and his digestion, as well as supporting him mentally, emotionally and spiritually, irrespective of treating his cancer," Geffen says. None of that was available through traditional medicine.

In fact, he says, there was a deep and profound condescension in the medical establishment about complementary care. "This was very painful, because at the time they were not offering him even remote hope of cure with conventional therapy," Geffen says. "On top of that, there were no meaningful suggestions offered about how to deal with his mind, his thoughts, his beliefs, his emotions, or how to prepare himself spiritually for death."

Geffen then made the rounds of the top complementary healers in the northeastern United States. "I was even more disappointed by what I experienced there," he says. "What I found for the most part were very loving, sincere people who often had no real understanding of the biology of metastatic gastric cancer -- let alone all of its complications -- and who didn't have the medical expertise to handle a man this sick." Even more painful was the fact that some complementary healers refused to treat Geffen's father because he was "poisoning" himself with chemotherapy.

"I felt as if I was in a medical Tower of Babel. All these people were unwilling or unable to communicate with each other to help my father," he says. Out of that process came a "burning, crystal clear" conviction that Geffen was going to become an oncologist, and that he was going to create a modern, comprehensive cancer center where this would not happen; where a cancer patient could be treated by an oncologist who really knew medicine, biology, and physiology, but also was well-versed in complementary and spiritual approaches to healing.

"Even more importantly, I was determined to become an oncologist who would really be able to touch the heart, mind, soul, and spirit of a human being as effectively and as skillfully as I could work with their physiology and their physical body," he says.

For more information, contact the Geffen Cancer Center and Research Institute, 981 - 37th Place, Vero Beach, FL 32960, phone (772) 770-5800 or (800) 834-4791. Or visit their website, at www.geffencenter.com.