“In One Section of Beth Israel Hospital, Some Patients Are Saying Om, Not Ah”</p>
<p>Medical advances sometimes happen in strange ways. Someone finds a fungus in dirty lab dishes and eureka! penicillin is born. Now a premier Manhattan hospital is turning a cancer-treatment floor over to a world-famous fashion designer in the hope that serendipity, science and intuition will strike again.</p>
<p>A foundation run by Donna Karan, creator of the seven easy pieces philosophy of womens wardrobes and founder of the much-imitated DKNY line of clothing, has donated $850,000 for a yearlong experiment combining Eastern and Western healing methods at Beth Israel Medical Center. Instead of just letting a celebrated donor adopt a hospital wing, renovate it and have her name embossed on a plaque, the Karan-Beth Israel project will have a celebrated donor turn a hospital into a testing ground for a trendy, medically controversial notion: that yoga, meditation and aromatherapy can enhance regimens of chemotherapy and radiation.</p>
<p>While we are giving patients traditional medicine, we are not going to exclude patients values and beliefs, said Dr. David Shulkin, the chief executive of Beth Israel, noting that a third of Americans seek alternative treatments. To make care accessible to these third of Americans, were trying to embrace care that makes them more comfortable.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, Dr. Shulkin, who had never done yoga before, joined Ms. Karan and about 60 Beth Israel employees on the floor of her late husbands West Village art studio for an hour of yoga poses, finishing off with om and the recorded sound of bells.</p>
<p>They didnt teach us that in medical school, Dr. Shulkin said afterward, still sitting barefoot on his black mat, swearing he had put his BlackBerry on meditation mode and had not checked it. Asked if the yoga had worked, he formed his answer carefully: I think the personal touch and the personal attention to a patient absolutely works.</p>
<p>The husband-and-wife team leading Wednesdays session Ms. Karans yoga masters, Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman Yee will oversee the experiment. Fifteen yoga teachers will be sent to Beth Israels ninth-floor cancer ward starting in January to work with nonterminal patients, and nurses will be trained in relaxation techniques. Their salaries, as well as a cosmetic overhaul of the ward, are being paid for by Ms. Karans Urban Zen Foundation, created after her husband and business partner, Stephan Weiss, 62, died of lung cancer in 2001.</p>
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<p>[Donna Karan] traces her commitment to integrative medicine to what she saw as the narrowly limited treatment of her husband, a sculptor, and of Lynn Kohlman, a photographer, model and DKNY fashion director who was still ravishing and dignified despite the staples in her head and mastectomy scars on her chest when she died of brain cancer in September.</p>
<p>Ms. Karan longed for the help of a Marcus Welby, the kind of friendly, wise doctor who seemed possible only on television, and even then in a more innocent era. Today everybodys a specialist, she lamented in an interview. Were only one person, even though we have a lot of parts, but everybody takes a piece of us.</p>
<p>Despite all his high-tech medical treatment, her husband could not breathe, she recalled, until a yoga teacher taught him to open his lungs. He went from ah-ah-ah, she said, mimicking his gasping for breath, to aaaaahh.</p>
<p>Everybody was dealing with his disease, she said of the doctors. Nobody was looking at him holistically as a patient. How do you treat the patient at the mind-body level? Not only the patient but the loved one?</p>
<p>Ms. Kohlman apparently sensed her illness before her doctors did. Lying on the floor during a yoga session at a beach resort on Parrot Cay, a tiny Caribbean island, she began to shake. Youre having kundalini rising, Mr. Yee, the yoga master who is partnering with Ms. Karan at Beth Israel, yelled, running to her side. Ms. Kohlman, who wrote about the experience for Vogue, insisted, I have brain cancer.</p>
<p>She intensified her yoga. She asked for it in the hospital, said Ms. Karan, who practices yoga daily. She needed it, she wanted it.</p>
<p>This works, Ms. Karan insisted. Now we have to prove it in the clinical setting.</p>
<p>To do that, she turned to Beth Israel because it is among the handful of hospitals nationwide with full-fledged integrative medicine departments. Beth Israels department is headed by Woodson Merrell, known as Woody, who rides a silver Vespa to his Upper East Side office and who made the obligatory pilgrimage to India in the 1960s. Beth Israel has experimented with integrating mainstream and alternative therapies for eight years, mainly through the Continuum Center, which employs 10 doctors. In the spring, integrative medicine was elevated to department status, just like surgery, orthopedics and the rest.</p>
<p>A lot of other hospitals have integrative medicine, but its kind of stuck away in the basement, said Dr. Merrell, who, not coincidentally, is Ms. Karans internist. People like to think its not there. Starting in November, the cancer ward will be renovated by Ms. Karan, the architect David Fratianne and Alex Stark, a feng shui master. The dull beige walls and green linoleum tile floors will be replaced with bamboo wallpaper and cork floors. Nooks and crannies now used for brown-bag lunches and naps and crammed with a desultory selection of dusty books will be turned into yoga, prayer and meditation retreats for patients, their families and nurses.</p>
<p>Urban Zen will cover the salaries of a patient navigator, a sort of cancer-ward concierge, and a yoga coordinator. The Yees and Dr. Merrell expect that about half the eligible patients will decline to participate. Those who do will find a flexible definition of yoga, with some who are very ill simply getting help to breathe from a yogi who will also manipulate their limbs, rub their feet or simply listen to them.