Dr. Edgar Staren: Our integrated model has two important components – number 1, we meet regularly. You will hear about multi-modal therapy, we have talked about it many of the centers and basically what that means is that you’ll have a couple of doctors and maybe three doctors that are talking. Instead, our team is made up of 20, 30, 50 individuals – all meeting together in multiple disciplines.
In addition to the physicians - the surgical, medical and radiation oncologists – our complimentary team is composed of naturopathic doctors, members of the mind-body team, spiritual team, our pain team, our nutritional team, acupuncturists, all together at the same time giving of themselves regarding the patient under their care.
Finally, people that may not be directly involved in the care of that patient are still part of that team and when they hear the problem ongoing, they will have things to contribute an idea that the rest of the team may not have thought of. So getting that group together often provides opportunities for therapies that otherwise would not have been addressed in a standard model.
Lynette Bisconti: When I met Dr. Williams for the first time she hugged me. She immediately became a human being with compassion and my peer. She asked me what I wanted. She asked me what I was comfortable with. She asked me what my goals were. She asked me if nutrition and all of these things that now I know are called ‘whole body medicine’ or integrative medicine, were important to me.
She asked me about that and when I told her what my goals were and what instinctually I knew I had to do in order to survive, she pulled this team in to lay out that plan for me. I had a naturopath, I had a nutritionist, I had a psycho-neuroimmunologist to work on mind-body stuff. I had everybody talking to me working on my plan.
Carolyn Lammersfeld: We actually are involved with the patient’s care from day one. We meet with patients and do a nutritional assessment, share that information with the patient’s oncologist and actually are involved in deciding, in many cases, if the patient is nutritionally fit enough to begin treatment.
Dr. Edgar Staren: We know that patients with cancer often are malnourished. If a person is being treated for that malnutrition they are much better able to tolerate the traditional therapies. We are able to give them the chemotherapy. They are able to recover from the surgical procedure. They are able to tolerate the radiation therapy and that’s key to their successful recovery.
Lynette Bisconti: What you get here is not alternative. What you get here is the best possible care integrated into conventional care. So what you get here is the best possible care in every area. It’s whole person care.
Rev. Percy McCray: Being a hospital chaplain unlike working in say a parish or church ministry, we have to be extremely sensitive and mindful of the fact that patients are dictating what we do and what we don’t do. In many cases patients are not really concerned about your theological perspective as much as they are concerned about do you care about them and are you willing to connect with them on a human level.