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About This Story
Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease at a time when treatments for the condition were harsh and life expectancy was low. Decades later, she is living a full and healthy life. She talks about how one caring nurse impacted her outlook and, ultimately, her life.
About the Common Therapies List
The therapies listed in the orange sidebar are not necessarily meant to treat conditions directly. Often they are used to reduce stress, therefore increasing a person’s ability to cope and/or heal.
Customized Care
Brian Berman
University of Maryland School of Medicine
Excerpted from The New Medicine Interviews
With many of the chronic diseases, we need to take a multidisciplinary approach. We need to look at physical, but also emotional, mental, and spiritual factors that are affecting the person. And, we need to have a team approach to the care, because there’s not going to be one magic bullet that’s going to help all of that person’s problem with that particular chronic disease.
At our center, we try to teach people with chronic diseases ways that they can help themselves, as well as options that may be helpful for them. That might entail teaching people something like mindfulness-based stress reduction, so they can learn about meditation, reading, and some gentle yoga stretches. They can also learn other ways to help themselves like nutrition and exercise programs.
Neuro-Emotional Technique (NET)
Anna Tobia, PhD Clinical Psychologist
Jefferson-Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine
Chronic medical problems like cancer, headaches and pain, diabetes,
and a wide array of other conditions can have a profound emotional
impact. As a clinical psychologist at the Jefferson-Myrna Brind
Center for Integrative Medicine, I have found that interventions that
integrate mind, body and energy can be life-changing and help patients
face their illnesses in an emotionally balanced way.
Neuro-Emotional Technique (NET) is a powerful integrative tool. It
applies the principles of both traditional Chinese medicine and the
validated constructs of classical psychology. NET places the patient’s
presenting psychological issues within the larger context of the
patient’s life patterns. It provides a pathway that traces a
patient’s reaction to a current stress back to previous life
experiences. Our reactions are often automatic and unconscious.
Awareness is crucial to improvement. Once we recognize how we respond
and why we behave the way we do, it becomes possible to manage and
shift the psycho-physiological reaction to stress. We can then choose
to respond differently.