Mar 11, 2009 7:53 pm US/Eastern
Donna Karan Designing A New Fashion...In Medicine
World Famous Designer Leading Effort To Combine Eastern Practices With Western Medicine At Beth Israel Hospital
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
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Donna Karan is leading the effort to combine eastern practices with western medicine to treat an entire floor of cancer patients.
CBS
It could be the beginning of no less than a revolution in health care, and it's from a seemingly unlikely source: fashion designer Donna Karan. She's teamed up with a hospital to change patient treatment, and in an exclusive interview, she opens up about what's behind the deeply personal project.
For two decades, Karan's designs have been a smash on runways around the world, her business a multi-million dollar empire. And for years, her husband and business partner, Stephen Weiss, was at her side every step of the way.
"I feel he never left me," she tells CBS 2.
Now, eight years later, after his death from cancer, Weiss is the inspiration behind one of Karan's most ambitious projects – this one off the runway.
It's happening at Beth Israel Hospital, where Karan is leading the effort to combine eastern practices with western medicine to treat an entire floor of cancer patients. The project is the direct result of her experience with her husband's illness.
"When Stephen was diagnosed I was shocked," she says.
Karan says doctors did a good job treating Weiss' lung cancer, but she was frustrated by the limits of traditional medicine.
"What I realized was people were treating the disease, but who was treating the patient?" she tells CBS 2. "It became very apparent that we can't just treat the disease. The patient and the patient's loved ones needed to be treated as well."
And so Karan took charge and brought in a team that provided Weiss with alternative therapies. She said it not only eased his mind, but also eased physical symptoms.
"He needed his acupuncture, he needed his meditation, he needed his yoga practices to breathe and align his body," she says. "It was helping the program of his life and bettered his life experience, no question in my mind."
While doctors at the hospital will still provide conventional cancer treatments, yoga teachers will work alongside them, and nurses have been trained in the healing arts.
"I never felt like western medicine had all the answers," admits nurse Shirley Escala. "I feel like it's cutting edge. It shouldn't be cutting edge, but it is, so we're really happy about it."
Karan says she believes this program will ultimately set a new standard for care, that she is on a mission to create for the ill a community of compassion.
"Everybody knows that Stephen came from one place and that was love and compassion," she says. "If I can carry on his legacy of the creativity, the passion, that's what I'm here to do."
The project will be fully up and running on an entire floor by next month, and it includes a research component to determine if adding alternative therapies cuts costs.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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