No: 13 in a series of articles - Dean Ornish...
To many Dean Ornish M.D. needs little introduction. His face has been seen many times on television and on the face of his four best selling books. Ornish and his chefs helped the Clintons lighten up the White House cuisine while William Jefferson was in office. He has been an advisor to many other notables and celebrities, written about in USA Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and a myriad of other recognizable national publications and was the cover of Newsweek magazine.
Why is he so famous and recognizable? Well he studied the relationship between diet and heart disease and showed unequivocally that changing one’s diet and lifestyle can prevent and reverse heart disease. But it did not stop there. While diet was shown to be important, equally or even perhaps more important, depending upon ones perspective, was his findings about love and intimacy in relation to heart disease. For small example from the very comprehensive study; women who felt isolated were three-and-a-half times as likely to die of breast, ovarian or uterine cancer over a 17 year period. Men who answered NO to the question “Does your wife show you her love?” suffered 50% more angina over a five-year period. The complete study is quite enlightening and is available from the Preventive Medicine Research Institute.
Dr. Ornish, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco has been a vegetarian for most of his adult life. This Harvard trained physician has bucked the medical establishment and advocated lifestyle changes as a way to combat heart disease. The Ornish program challenges the whole infrastructure of the medical business yet more and more doctors, even cardiovascular specialists encourage their patients to use Dr. Dean’s program.
With so many men contracting prostate cancer, men’s leading cancer and second only in deaths to heart disease it is understandable why Dr. Ornish’s attention would turn to PC. My reason for interviewing Dr. Ornish was because of his widely read and well received study of the relationship of diet and prostate cancer. While it did not mirror the overwhelming evidence of his heart study, it did show a clear indication that “lifestyle changes can beneficially affect the progression of early prostate cancer”. His comments in my documentary expand upon these results since the post study observations add even more weight to the already established facts.
Dr. Dean lives the life of which he preaches. Of the four books he has written the one that impresses me the most is “Love and Survival – 8 Pathways to Intimacy”. Andrew Weil M.D., himself a leading light for alternative and/or complementary medicine calls it the most im0portant book ever written about love and health. As I progress with the many interviews I am conducting for my documentary, one common theme is taking an extraordinary position, kind of like the 300 pound gorilla. The mental and emotional quotient in prostate and perhaps all disease is the most overlooked when a call for treatment is put out. I will learn more of this when I interview Bruce Lipton Ph.D. and Dawson Church Ph.D.