November 23, 2004
Dana-Farber's complementary therapies program grows as the benefits of its services gain wider acceptance among patients, clinicians
David Rosenthal, MD
Five years after an impassioned Leonard Zakim expressed hope for establishing a place where he and other Dana-Farber patients could seek help to manage their treatments and "give us some of our life back," caregivers associated with the DFCI center named in his honor shared how those dreams have become a reality here.
Speaking at the fifth annual "Lenny Lecture" on Nov. 11, David Rosenthal, MD, told a packed Smith Family Room audience about progress made in combining complementary therapies — which many in the field prefer to call "integrative therapies" — with traditional cancer treatment. Rosenthal, medical director of the Institute's Leonard P. Zakim Center for Integrative Therapies, explained that services such as acupuncture, Reiki, therapeutic touch, and nutritional consults once shunned by many in the medical community as "quackery" are increasingly seen as ways of helping patients and their families deal with pain, fatigue, and anxiety often connected with cancer treatment.
"The efforts of cancer therapy and complementary therapy run parallel," said Rosenthal, who is also director of Harvard University Health Services and a past president of the American Cancer Society. "During the past decade, we've seen incredible technological advances in cancer care, such as the development of chemotherapy pills that target malignant cells and spare normal ones. At the same time, we're seeing a tremendous rise in cancer patients' use of integrative therapy. This increase was largely patient-driven at first, but now many physicians and nurse practitioners are observing how their patients are satisfied — and helped — by these therapies and are making direct recommendations."
This growing acceptance is reflected in the numbers, Rosenthal pointed out. Opened in the fall of 2000, just 10 months after Lenny's death from multiple myeloma, the Zakim Center has gone from approximately 800 patient visits during its first year of operation to more than 3,000 expected visits this year. Additional services such as music therapy, massage, and dance and art programs have been added, and Rosenthal now conducts patient consults in which he makes sure individuals are practicing integrative techniques safely and without complications with their standard treatment.
"When we opened, we had one treatment room in the Dana 1 infusion area, a few educational lectures, and one research study," Zakim Center Executive Director Cynthia Medeiros, LICSW, said before Rosenthal's talk, which kicked off two days of Lenny Lecture activities that drew many staff and patients. "Today we practice out of three suites on Dana 11 and one in the newly renovated Jimmy Fund Clinic, and we are credentialing practitioners to work on inpatient beds at Brigham and Women's Hospital as part of the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center. For the past three years we've offered monthly educational programs, and we now have four funded research studies.
"This month, several of our staff will be presenting at the first international conference of the new Society of Integrative Oncology in New York City, which we have been very instrumental in helping develop," she added. "We think Lenny's center has surpassed even his wildest dreams."
Besides Rosenthal's address, the Nov. 11 event included demonstrations of massage, meditation, and other center offerings. This was followed up the next morning by a second presentation by David Eisenberg, MD, director of the Harvard Medical School's Osher Institute for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative Medical Therapies, about national and local research trends in the field and their implications for oncology. A research collaborative between the Zakim Center and Osher Institute now includes studies on the benefits of massage at life's end, the effect of acupuncture on chemotherapy-induced neutropenia (a reduction in the number of white blood cells), and more. In addition, one pediatric and one adult integrative medicine fellow from the Osher Institute will soon be starting a clinical rotation at the center.
The Zakim Center's Zhi Ping Li (right) discusses the finer points of acupuncture with a lecture attendee.
'A great gift'
When meeting annually with each of DFCI's 11 disease centers to inform them about Zakim Center research efforts and get ideas for future studies, Rosenthal says he and fellow center physician Elizabeth Dean-Clower, MD, are repeatedly hearing "how much their patients love our services." Those individuals and families who took part in the integrative therapy demonstrations after Rosenthal's talk echoed this satisfaction.
"I've done Reiki, massage, and acupuncture since being diagnosed two years ago, and it's been remarkably helpful," said Sandra Fishman, currently in remission from ovarian cancer. "During treatment I did all three each week I had chemo, and the process helped me relax and feel empowered that I was doing something to help myself through the experience. The practitioners are very compassionate."
Bob Sheeley, a colon cancer patient whose disease has metastasized to his liver and lung, says acupuncture sessions at the Zakim Center have stopped the terrible diarrhea he experienced from chemotherapy. "To have this prior to chemotherapy is a great gift," says Sheeley. "My wife is a nurse who knew about the benefits of acupuncture for nausea, but we had never heard it could help with this problem until we came to the Zakim Center." Now Sheeley comes in for weekly acupuncture treatments and has added massage therapy to his regimen as well.
"This was Lenny's dream," says Eisenberg, who introduced Zakim to integrative therapies in the mid-1990s. "To be able to see how his legacy is expanding is a breathtaking experience for all of us."
