All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 1, 2019 - Dr. Oz Podcast
36:30
How Donna Karan Is Designing Better Medical Care

Nicknamed the Queen of Seventh Avenue, she's the fashion designer behind DKNY. Now, Donna Karan is designing something new: a better experience for hospital patients. Donna joins Dr. Oz to talk about her career in fashion, her Urban Zen Foundation initiatives, and how she thinks medical care needs to change. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Steven needed yoga.
Steven used to go, you and your woo-woos over here.
Until he couldn't breathe.
And Iyengar yoga was an enormous help during his process of lung cancer.
You know, opening his lungs.
There are certain things, they are so simple, that could be utilized at a hospital level.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
A few months ago, I was invited to this weird event.
Weird because it was called this Urban Zen Initiative.
Urban to me is sort of urbane, right?
It's cool, it's hip, it's in the city, lots of stuff happening, lights, magic.
And Zen, to me anyway, connoted the exact opposite.
And Lisa, of course, who's the root of most of the good of my life, she said, again, we have to go to the Orbison Initiative.
We have to go, we have to go, we have to go.
And I started getting called by folks around it.
And I learned that Donna Karan was behind it.
Donna, who I did not know well, but I'd heard a ton of, and never, ever, ever a negative word around her voice.
And I was impressed that so many folks thought that what she was trying to do was so important.
That I did what I almost never do, which is take time away from the hospital.
I actually went down and looked at this thing.
So I went down to the Urban Zen Initiative and I started to learn about a movement that Nana Karanis created that is transformative at many levels.
Transformative in that she's taking an experience that generally isn't found in the hustle-bustle lives that many of us live and making it Physically possible at that same point, which is pretty good because if you can't find the Zen experience in your day-to-day life, you're not going to go looking for it as much.
But she's also tackling one of the biggest challenges in the healthcare system, which is that we are getting better and better at the high-tech approaches to solving disease.
But as we take people who would have died and keep them alive, we fail continually providing the holistic approach to the wellness that they really crave.
And it's that dual approach that caught my attention, and I'm honored today to have Donna on the show.
Donna, thanks for joining us.
Thank you, Mehmet.
Let's talk a tiny bit about you first, and I won't give your long extended bio, just for the few people who don't know everything about you already.
This is the same Nina Krano of DKNY, someone who's been an influential designer, businesswoman, philanthropist for more than two decades.
Her story starts actually in New York and in Brooklyn, I think, if I'm not mistaken.
Probably five towns, Long Island.
Is that right, Five Towns?
All right, so it starts along on her father is a haberdasher, if I recall, and so he's a man who has a gift for design and style.
Mother's a model, and among other things, and a mother.
I was brought up on 7th Avenue, so I was born on 7th Avenue.
Oh, you were?
Yeah.
In the city?
Yeah.
Well, not, you know, in the larger point of it, because my father being on 7th Avenue, my mother being on 7th Avenue, and when your parents are at work, you're sort of brought up on the avenue.
Right.
That's right.
So that's why I'm considered home with 7th Avenue.
So I've lived there for quite a number of years.
Unfortunately, my father died when I was three, and my mother passed away from cancer, and Very early on.
So disease has sort of been around my whole life completely.
I don't think I'd be sitting here today if it wasn't for my boss Ann Klein, Ann, who passed away from cancer the week my daughter was born.
Oh my goodness.
The world of the medical world and the disease world is something that has always been around me.
While I've been designing at the same time.
So I'm in one hospital bed giving birth to a baby, and my boss is in another hospital bed.
At that point, one didn't even discuss the word cancer.
It was the undiscussable.
She didn't even tell me she had it.
And we had a collection due that same week.
And it was just the two of us.
So we're talking from hospital to hospital and they call me up and they say, well Donna, when are you coming back to work?
I said, would you like to ask me if I had a boy or a girl?
Take me back a little bit to, you lose your mother and your father.
My father passed away when I was three of a car accident.
Oh, it was trauma.
And when you went through the, in your early adulthood, there was probably an epiphany where you said, you know what, I can actually probably start to design clothes and make things happen for folks.
I have a vision for what fashion might look like.
I think, basically, interestingly enough, because I was around fashion as much, I wanted to be a singer.
I wanted to sing like Barbara and dance like...
Oh, God, what is her name?
Bristikoff.
Exactly.
Martha Graham.
Martha Graham.
Is that right?
Yes.
It was Martha because it was Martha in the clothes and the bodysuit and all that.
Now, interestingly enough, I had started to do yoga when I was very, very young.
It started when I was about 15, 16 years old when yoga was just not even discussed.
And so the whole body and the movement, I don't know.
It was just something that was called to me.
Because it wasn't so popular back in the 70s or 80s, you know. 60s. 60s.
It wasn't.
Our mutual friend Dean Ornish was one of the earlier yoga devotees, and he was over in India, so.
So you just stumbled on it?
On 7th Avenue.
On 7th Avenue.
I know.
I was the woo-woo designer.
I was considered one of those woo-woo designers, which they never understood, quite honestly.
So I love fashion.
I wasn't a very good student.
Failed typing, failed draping.
You know, I had a little ADD problem.
How about sewing?
Oh, forget it.
I burnt my dress.
They told me I would never make it as a fashion designer at all.
It's usually most people, I find, who have made it, you know, are against obstacles, you know, reaching the obstacle, reaching the obstacle.
And I went to an amazing...
Experience where people were honored.
And all those who were honored are really kind of people who really had to work their butt off to get there.
Something that doesn't come easy.
And if it comes easy, it's just not cool.
I think it also reflects folks who are passionate about what they're doing.
Because if you really, really, really want to do it, no matter what people say, you probably become pretty good at it.
Regardless of all odds.
Regardless of all odds.
That's what Urban Sense is about.
Regardless of all odds right now.
So after a storied career, and we'll come back to it in a second, doing fashion, you've had trials and tribulations in your own life, and most recently you lost...
My husband?
Your husband.
Of cancer.
Of cancer.
And walk me through that process, if you don't mind.
And I know you've faced disease a lot, but when did it begin to strike you that you needed to do something about it?
Well, I think on so many levels, I think, you know, with Anne, I must say that as an epidemic, AIDS hit the fashion industry really hard and heavy.
You know, and people didn't want to talk about it.
It was a non-discussable.
And I'll never forget Perry Ellis, being the head of CFDA, having AIDS at that point, not wanting to discuss it.
I said, Perry, what's the matter?
I said, we must do something about this AIDS epidemic.
It's unacceptable.
So very early on in my career...
I wanted to bring attention and awareness to what was going on out there, you know, to bring a community together to make a difference out there in the world.
And it started with the AIDS epidemic, actually, with Perry.
And I said, here's a great idea.
You know, let's all come together as a unit and really make a difference in the world of AIDS. And Perry says, it's a private issue.
I don't want to discuss it.
It was the same as Anne's.
Cancer.
Don't discuss it.
It was all this under-the-table stuff of disease, and nobody wanted to deal with it, and yet it was affecting each and every one of our lives.
And for me, it was like a call of action.
Very, very early on in my life.
And at that point, I said, I had this great idea, which I thought was a great idea.
It was sort of a great idea, because fundraisers are sort of boring.
You know, you sit around a table and you collect money and say, oh, I don't have to go to another fundraiser, boar, boar, boar, boar, boar.
I said, why don't we get the fashion industry?
Everybody loves to shop, Lisa, as you were just talking about shopping, right?
You know, how to get somebody right in the pocket to shop.
Let's get all the designers to empty out their Design rooms and do a super seventh on sale day where we would take all the clothes, all our leftovers and set up in the armory and have an amazing day.
So we had a three-day experience and we raised quite a number, three million dollars in those days for AIDS. So that was my first philanthropic work, and I would have to say, if somebody would ask me the highlight of my career, it would be that day.
Is that right?
Yeah.
You know, having been to the 7th on sale, and I think I was a resident, I remember buying, actually it was a jacket, I don't remember the designer now, but I still wear it.
I think it cost me about $15, but it was wonderful.
Well, that's it.
You always can attract somebody through another side, and then, oh, what's that all about?
And nobody was discussing AIDS at that point.
You know, of course, the medical industry was, but we were having friends that we were losing right and left.
You know, so cancer was over here, but the AIDS epidemic, which really hit hard, particularly in our industry.
And I said, I cannot sit back and watch this happen.
So I had to take a proactive.
I got out of winter together.
And at that time, unfortunately, when I said to Perry, Perry, what's the matter?
He says, do you believe I'm allergic to cabbage?
I mean, that was how people were approaching age.
Nobody wanted to define the fact that they had AIDS. So, of course, we've come a long way.
After I did that, a friend of mine also who contacted cancer, well, I had Anne who dealt with cancer, and then Elizabeth Tabaris from Harper's Bazaar, at that time, had ovarian cancer.
And I said, what are we going to do?
You know, nobody knows about ovarian cancers.
Nobody's talking about a great...
Seventh on sale.
It works.
In the backyard out in the Hamptons, we started to empty our closets one more time and do a garden party.
You know, photographers would come and we started this little party in the back of Liz Tabaris' house, which has now become Super Saturday.
Which happens out now in the Hamptons.
And we've got the whole Seventh on Sale kind of crew now out in the Hamptons.
And we just did $4 million for ovarian cancer.
In one day?
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
And I started that over 10 years ago.
But in between was Elizabeth Glazer, who after I had Perry, I met with Elizabeth and heard her story.
And I got, oh, my God, my heart went boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
What can we do?
Children with AIDS, this is unacceptable.
How do we bring awareness to children with AIDS, get all the families together, start Kids for Kids?
Downtown, got the designers together, got the shops, got the celebrities, put that all together.
So philanthropic has always been sort of one of my passions, more so than I would say designing.
You have been a leader in that arena.
But I must say, being able to raise money for worthy causes is one aspect of what you've seen that's laudable.
But the part that's really caught my attention, because there are many wonderful philanthropists out there, and all of whose work should be appropriately recognized.
But there are some people who take a vision that's so outside the mainstream.
That for most folks is not on the radar screen.
Right.
And have a way of bringing their passion to it and letting it fuse on to others so they not begin to pay attention to it.
And urban zen for me has represented that.
And if I have read your recollection of what got you to do it, it was partly this recognition that you kept going places outside the city.
You have leaving New York to find salvation.
Today I might feel the same way.
Because urban zen doesn't technically almost exist, it's almost getting there.
But since I don't have the zen in the urban, even though, which you really do have to come over to my apartment, people walk into my apartment and go, where am I? You know, it's all of a sudden the energy goes down.
Right.
You know, and you can find, you know, for those of us who do practice, that Zen is inside of us all.
Mm-hmm.
You know, but to create, we all tend to say, I got to go away.
I got to go here.
I've just, me, I've just come back from my yoga retreat, you know, in Parake and or to Bali or wherever I go and, you know, try to get away from the urban.
But, and I remember when I was very young, I used to go to Canyon Ranch.
Right.
And I said to Mel Zuckerman, I said, this is crazy.
Why am I going there when I need to come here?
The craziest place in the world, the chaos of New York City, but let's bring the calm and the chaos.
Right.
Voila, urban zen.
So I said, this was my vision to find the calm and the chaos.
Now, we all know that we all strive on chaos, because without chaos, there can't be any calm, you know, and vice versa.
It's a foil.
Exactly.
So we need it.
We have lots more questions to get to.
But first, let's take a quick break.
Can you, I hope people want to explain what the Urban Zen Initiative is all about.
Okay.
The Urban Zen Initiative basically is bring awareness, inspire change.
And I have to go backward before I go forward.
Yes, my husband was ill with cancer, and I lived with that for seven years.
A best girlfriend of mine had breast cancer, brain cancer, and her journey is extraordinary.
She also was on the Oprah show, Lynn Coleman, and she did an amazing book.
But we hear these stories every single day, constantly.
But Urban Zen for me was more about how to bring awareness and inspire change.
And there are two things that happened which inspired me to move forward with the Urban Zen initiative.
One was, a girlfriend said to me, how would you like to have the Dalai Lama in the studio?
And I go, oh, that's a terrible idea.
Yeah.
I said, you've got to be kidding.
How can you say no to His Holiness the Dalai Lama?
Right.
So that was two years ago, and His Holiness came, and we had an event for Tibet and the people of Nobilinka.
And what had happened is His Holiness had to go to L.A., and during that time...
Rodney Yee was supposed to do a yoga retreat, and he says, listen, I've got to stay here for His Holiness.
However, the day he was supposed to be here, he changed his plans to L.A. So Rodney says, I'm going to do a yoga retreat that day, you know, instead of having His Holiness there.
So everybody who was coming to see His Holiness came to Rodney's day of yoga.
Did they know they were coming to yoga, or did they think they were going to see the Dalai Lama?
No, because we arranged it.
They were known that far.
Did anybody mistake Rodney Eve for the Dalai Lama?
Well, sort of, no.
So they came in, they did yoga with Rodney, the following day was His Holiness, and I walked in and I said, Donna, it can no longer be a vision.
It is now a reality.
So when I walked into the studio, I knew it was anointed.
I mean, to have His Holiness in the studio was really an extraordinary exhibit.
The studio, I have to go back for those people who don't know, the studio was my husband's art studio where everything was created.
So the energy in itself is a very sacred space for me.
I think it's my favorite spot in Manhattan.
Actually, the roof garden in your studio is my favorite spot in Manhattan.
That's a beautiful story because he wanted me to live there.
Outside?
Right.
In the garden.
What kind of man was he?
That's more my kind of stuff.
My husband was a wild guy.
He raced motorcycles right up to the end.
But he wanted me to live there.
And I said, honey, you don't understand.
I have to live on a park or on the water.
Those are your two choices in life if I'm going to live in the city.
He says, I'll build you a park.
So on top of the studio, that's how the park happened.
But I said, I do not live where I work, where you work.
It's just never going to happen.
So I think I needed to separate the two worlds.
But everybody walks in there and says, I can't believe you don't live here.
Well, that's because they haven't seen your apartment, which is equally spectacular.
But in that space, I knew the space was sacred.
It had energy there that was very special.
There was creation there.
My husband, philosophically, was very evolved, even though he didn't admit that he was evolved or did not want to take on to both worlds of medicine.
He was connecting the dots on a far earlier stage of the string theory before I even...
Even understood what that was all about.
So I knew the space had a certain energy.
So I was finding, there I was at Urban Zen.
And I was finding the calm and the chaos.
And having now a way to address, right after His Holiness, I had the Clinton Initiative.
And that was the call to action.
I said, I cannot sit here any longer.
I must make this happen.
It's a passion.
It's a dream.
And I still love designing clothes, but I was dressing people, and I needed to address the issues at hand.
From dressing to addressing.
So as most people know me, one is not enough, God forbid.
So there are three basic initiatives, past, present, and future.
The past is preservation of culture.
The present is wellness, and the future is the empowering of our children.
Because to me, it all lives in mind, body, and spirit, which is what I believe Urban Zen represents.
So when I was at the Clinton Initiative, very inspired by the dialogue, the input, and I'm saying, here we've got...
So we took on...
Actually, the first initiative was going to be on Africa, interestingly enough.
And as...
Synchronicity has it, according to Deepak.
We got to a point where wellness just came up to front because Vanity Fair was doing a yoga issue, if anybody would remember that.
And when Braden said, it's launching in May, that's how the date sort of came.
I said, okay, everybody can read Yoga Journal, but how many people are going to be aware of yoga coming through Vanity Fair's eyes would be a great way of introducing Urban Zen.
Right.
So, every night we'd sit in my apartment saying, and I would say, there's something wrong with the medical system.
Right after my husband passed away, I realized there was a huge, huge void.
And on a philanthropic level, I wanted to make a difference out there in the medical system.
I believe we treat disease brilliantly, where I think there is a huge void is treating the patient in a holistic way.
It's not east or west, it's not either or, but the word and.
How do we treat the patient in its totality?
And that being that looking at a patient, caring, there are very limited people like yourself, you know, they're a handful.
And it's not, I don't believe it's intentional.
I think there are a lot of shields that have come up because of the amount that they're stricken with and the problems that were dealt with.
You know, the confusion, the chaos of a hospital.
Who is caring for the patient?
That used to be the job of the nurse.
My husband said to me very, very clearly right before he passed, Donna, do not forget the nurses.
The nurses are such a strong component to caring for the patient.
But I realized on both my husband's journey and also Lynn's what was needed and what was missing in the hospitals.
It became very, very apparent that I had my posse.
It was like I come around with my personal posse.
My nutritional posse, my hands-on healing posse.
Stephen needed yoga.
I had a wonderful Iyengar teacher, Lindsay, work with Stephen.
Stephen used to go, you and your woo-woos over here.
Until he couldn't breathe.
And Iyengar yoga was an enormous help during his process of lung cancer, you know, opening his lungs.
So as we're sitting around the table, and everyone had known that I usually don't go the normal way, or what is the norm today, is I was looking for a doctor who embraced both East and Western philosophies as medicine.
You know, to me, acupuncture could be a daily way of life.
I'd like to get up every morning and have acupuncture and feel very good.
Right.
You know, my B12 shots.
Okay, I'm ready to go to work, you know.
You know, there are certain things, they are so simple, that can be utilized at a hospital level.
So what I wanted to do was to say, okay, here's the hospital system.
How do we change the hospital system?
You know, and I've been working on this for a good many years, so I figured, let's bring all those knowledge together.
In a conference and to figure out how are we going to deal with the healthcare system.
I'm not dealing with cancer.
I'm not dealing with heart.
I'm not dealing with specific disease of anything, but how do we deal with the patient?
After the Urban Zen conference that you had, which is addressing that issue in particular, because we weren't there for the last day, did you have specific action steps that people could go away with and actually change something?
Do you have an outline of things that need to be changed and ways to change them?
What had happened, listen, it was going at a pace much faster than I had thought because I didn't expect the amount of people to respond.
But what was happening is all of a sudden there was a nurse day, and then there was a Buddhist day, and then there was a doctor's day, and then there was a death and dying day.
So each day had a theme to it because there were so many themes that need to be addressed in this particular area.
And we looked and we said, and we were asking also not only the panelists but the audience, we're all here to discuss there's a problem.
What are the resolutions?
And we had a wonderful person, Daniel Stone, who worked with the Clinton Initiative to help us pull the whole thing together, call to action.
How were you going to call to action?
What we've learned, we We have...
The Urban Zen Initiative can work on many folds.
At the moment, we are going into two hospitals.
One is Beth Israel, and two is Sloan Kinnering.
We are doing a test modality form that is going to be clinically tested.
We're taking over the entire cancer floor from the moment a person finds out they have cancer.
That we will be working with them, helping them navigate their course so that the doctor's doing their work, the nurse is doing their work, but we're coming in as an assistant, the Urban Zen Therapist assistant and navigators.
So we've put together a group of people and Rodney Yee who came up with the idea.
He says, my God, you know, the nurses are overworked.
The doctors are burnt out.
Where can we access another community of people?
Of healers that can come into the hospital in an organized way who can make a difference in people's lives.
So we came up with the idea, and it was actually Rodney's idea, and Woody and his team at Beth Israel are 100% committed to integrating their hospital.
So they said, oh, well, coming to the whole hospital, we said, well, wait a second, let's start a Florida time.
And I figured it'd be a great comparison to look at Sloan Kettering, who's dealing with cancer, as a cancer hospital, and Beth Israel, and we'll take two cancer opportunities.
What's happened up to now is all the hospitals want to do this.
We've got to walk before we run.
We've got to test the ways to see how this is going to work.
So what we're trying to create is the ultimate healing approach now.
The big handicap we have, or we're looking at, you know, to really make this successful, obvious is insurance companies.
You know, which was the one, you know, the place you didn't want to discuss at Urban Zen.
I called it like the bleep!
Anybody discuss Urban Zen?
We don't discuss that right now.
Let's discuss the problem.
Let's discuss the solution.
You should brought Michael Moore in.
Exactly.
And that was...
Really, one of the other parts of it, you know, he was dealing with that.
I said, perfect, Urban Zen over here, Michael Moore over here, we'll come together, get to Washington, you know.
It'll combust spontaneously.
When we come back with Don Coran, we're going to find out more about the Urban Zen Initiative.
But first, a quick break.
So, Don, let me ask you to talk a little bit about kids.
The three parts of the program, you mentioned where past, present, and future, you know, maintenance and restoration of culture, a little bit about wellness today.
But at the end of the day, part of the purpose of an adult is to make sure you can procreate and pass on, at a pure biological level, your genes, but at a more humanitarian level, the next generation of healthy, well-trained, and capable folks to carry on the mission.
What is Urban Zen doing about kids, and what's the Spirituality for Kids movement about?
I'll tell you, for me, I keep on doing it.
There's no visual here, so I think you're best to explain it.
You know, that we could keep pointing our fingers at all of the people that we can blame for the problems out there today.
But when you point your finger, there are three fingers pointing at yourself.
And those three fingers are pointing at me right now.
So I looked at those three fingers calling about the three initiatives.
And that's sort of how it all happened.
One finger at you-know-who, but I don't want to mention his names because I'm being politically correct, I think, at this moment.
And then three back at me and say, I can't blame anybody else for the world we're living in today.
I can only take action and I see it as a blessing.
I truly do.
I think everything that's happening right now all around us and Oprah definitively has taken a call to action and said, what are we going to do about our next generation?
There's a program called Spirituality for Kids.
It was started, it is not Kabbalah, you know, in its essence, but yes, it was started by the Kabbalah movement.
It is in nine countries and 33 cities.
It's in the school system right now, and it is a tool program of empowering children and allowing children to make their choices that they have empowered inside of themselves using a simple approach.
And the only way that I can, they use tools, sort of like there's a bowl of sugar.
Hmm.
And they put salt in the sugar.
And they say, the sugar is sweet.
And taste it.
And then you put the salt in it.
And you can take the salt out of the sugar.
Watch your words.
And then there's a beaded necklace.
And there's a string of beads.
And they beat all the necklaces together.
Each bead is independently unique.
And we're all together as one.
You cut the string.
We're all apart.
Exactly.
Then there's the chess, sort of the domino theory cause and effect.
Put up a whole thing of dominoes, they press the cause, and the effect is everything you do has an action, has an effect to it.
So the kids learn this system of modalities, and they play with two puppets.
the good guy and the opponent and two stories that we hear in our heads all the time and you have the choice to listen to these two people so what we do in sfk or not what we do what they do and what urban zen chooses to do is to help look at mind body and spirit and what we can do for children and one of the next forms that we are doing is to bring awareness and consciousness into the sfk movement because I personally have just come back from Israel,
working with the Palestinian and the Israeli children, and it's mind-blowing.
They're in Malawi.
They're in Israel.
We've done a documentary on it.
I went to Harlem, Brooklyn, Bronx, and so far we all go to Africa and we all go to the – but the impoverishment is sitting in our own backyard.
You know, when you go to Harlem and you hear the stories in Farakwe, the Farakwe school system did not want to send the kids to school unless they had the SFK program there.
Because what they're finding – SFK again, spirituality for kids.
SFK stands for spirituality for kids.
Unless they have the child open to learning and giving in compassion and awaring that they have the ability to change, they can't learn.
So I said to the teacher, I said, what are you missing in the educational system?
They have reading, writing, and arithmetic.
And the program works.
To me, not only like in the hospitals, but what is the ultimate way of teaching and caring for children?
They have to have other disciplines.
I would love to see yoga as a discipline in the class.
I said to one of the teachers, I said, you know, tell me about what it's like.
And she didn't know about SFK that one of her students was taking an SF teen program.
It's in Rikers Island, by the way, as well.
It's part of the program.
How does a listener find out if there's a spirituality for kids program in their city?
They could go online to SFK and find out where it is.
It's a grassroots organization.
It's been around for three years right now.
And you can start one in your, if you've got the passion to do it, start one in your city?
What needs to be done?
The teachers have to be trained.
Well, the teachers do it.
Well, either the teachers do it or, yes, a teacher needs to be trained.
So the obstacles that we have right now is everybody wants the program, but the teachers need to be trained to the program.
Why couldn't the listeners say, you know what, I live in Des Moines, Iowa, and I'm going to go into my school system and offer my time to help teach the kids during lunch if they want to learn yoga.
Why couldn't that be part of...
That's not SFK. SFK is purely a specific spirituality for kids.
From an Urban Zen perspective of empowering children, I'm looking at yoga separately.
I got it.
I understand.
So SFK is, you know, at Urban Zen, what we do is bring the collective together.
So SFK is a program in one of our empowering children.
I got it.
My larger vision is the same with in the hospitals.
What are all the tools that we need to change and shift hospitals?
I'm looking at what do we need to change and shift the empowerment of children.
Spirituality is one of them.
You know, mind, body, and spirit.
I look at the mind, the body, and the spirit.
The nutritional.
I think nutrition has to be changed in the school system.
Absolutely.
We can't be expecting our children to learn if they're eating the wrong food.
Right.
You know, and it's the same in the hospitals.
That wonderful story that I think it was Edie Falco says, you know, there my father just had a heart attack and they gave him a grilled cheese sandwich.
So what we're trying to do...
Hold the mayo.
Hold the mayo.
What we're trying to do is create the optimum healing cart that goes around the hospitals feeding all the patients nutritional food.
You know, that there will be juice and soups and all of that.
So let me just be concrete about this because I want folks who are listening to understand this well.
It's a lot I know we're talking about.
But that's okay.
Is it wrong for me to paraphrase the Urban State Initiative as an effort to mobilize an army of folks that are perhaps put into battalions with sometimes specialized training, sometimes just credentialing, sometimes just a way of venting and expressing a desire to help?
As I attended the events, I saw a lot of very interested folks, many of whom didn't know how to get involved.
So, for example, in the Cancer Institute initiative that you're going to do at Beth Israel, the people who actually go around the floor to help these folks who need help, they're going to need a little bit of coaching about how to work with people in a hospital.
Not a lot, because we've done it, but they need a little bit of coaching.
Is that the kind of effort that you're going to make to operationalize these ideas?
At the moment right now, we're looking for experts.
If people want to help right now, financial support is what's really needed, to be perfectly honest.
To come upon and say, I can give up my time and energy, we're looking for experts in the field who already do it.
We're trying to identify, like in a hospital, that you would have to go through a training program of some sort.
So what we're doing is we're hoping to make credentials the same way at SFK. You have to be a credentialed SFK teacher to teach SFK. Obviously, if somebody wants to support nutritionally in hospitals and they have access to bringing in juice and soups and healthy foods into the hospitals, we'd be very happy for that.
You know, and help in that respect.
If people wanted to donate, you know, CDs or music, because we're developing music tapes and guided visualizations.
But what we're trying to create is the optimum healing environment.
And we appreciate how many people do want to get involved in the movement.
But what we're trying to ascertain, first of all, is what is the program?
It's in a test study program at the moment.
It's being tested.
We're having it clinically tested.
So once we've got the power behind us, my vision is that once we create the optimum healing experience, then it can be rolled out to other cities.
How do folks find out more about it?
They can go online to the website, our new website, urbanzen.org.
The call to action is the fact that the importance that this is needed to change in the hospitals, to get hospitals involved, or into the educational system.
We're looking for the mass desire to make the change.
It is a movement, no question about that.
Well, let's say the one part about the entire endeavor that I really treasured was the emphasis on nursing.
And you recounted this a little bit when you talked about the loss of your husband.
But the nurses have been disenfranchised in the whole process.
And they were originally the caregivers.
Now they're primarily bookkeepers.
As we keep track of all the things we've done to you.
And less and less are they the ones who actually communicate to the patients.
You know, we do surveys of folks who are in our hospital.
I'm at New York Presbyterian, which is one of the biggest hospitals in the country.
We spend a lot of time collecting information about what upsets people.
So, I'm upset about the food, but guess what?
My patients claim they're upset about it, but they don't really expect good food.
I'm upset about the basic hospitality function, the gowns.
Patients don't like what they have, but they don't see that as their biggest obstacle.
They're unaware of the influence of those factors.
But what they do complain about all the time is lack of information.
They don't feel like they know what's happening to them.
And that's actually going to happen because we create a healing environment by changing the food and physical plant and aromatherapy and all the other things that might be part of this broader program.
But I also place nurses at the bedside where they can provide that caring, healing touch, which is ultimately also about communicating to folks.
I want to applaud you for all you've done.
It's wonderful to always spend some time with you.
I think the things you're doing both in the design world, which has made you so successful, well-known, but especially now, the wonderful job you're doing helping reform medicine.
▲
Export Selection