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Book Summary Video Interviews with Dr. Dean Ornish on his book “The Spectrum for HealthBootcamps.
Dean Ornish, MD, is the founder and president of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, Calif. He is the clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Ornish received his medical training in internal medicine from the Baylor College of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and the Massachusetts General Hospital. He received a BA in Humanities summa cum laude from the University of Texas in Austin, where he gave the baccalaureate address.
For more than 32 years, Ornish has directed clinical research demonstrating, for the first time, that comprehensive lifestyle changes may begin to reverse even severe coronary heart disease, without drugs or surgery. He directed the first randomized, controlled trial demonstrating that comprehensive lifestyle changes may stop or reverse the progression of early-stage prostate cancer. His research showed that comprehensive lifestyle changes affect gene expression, “turning on” disease-preventing genes and “turning off” genes that promote cancer and heart disease. In collaboration with Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, Ph.D., he also showed that these lifestyle changes can lengthen telomeres, the ends of chromosomes that control how long we live.
He is the author of six best-selling books, including New York Times bestsellers Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease; Eat More, Weigh Less; Love & Survival; and his most recent book, The Spectrum.
The research that he and his colleagues conducted has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Circulation, TheNew England Journal of Medicine, the American Journal of Cardiology, The Lancet Oncology, and elsewhere.
TRANSCRIPT:
This is auto-generated and may have mistakes. Please listen to the interview for accuracy.
[00:01] REENA JADHAV: All right chapter five, the nutrition spectrum. What is the nutrition spectrum?
[00:04] DR. DEAN ORNISH: That’s what we’ve been talking about; that I categorize foods from the most healthy Group One to least healthy group five. What matters most is your overall way of eating and living. You decide how much you want to change and what your goals are and if start by making moderate changes if that looks great if not do more. But again it’s worth mentioning again that sometimes actually making big changes all the once is actually easier than making moderate changes because you feel so much better so quickly and you see so many great results on your cholesterol or blood pressure or blood sugar. That makes you say okay this is big change but boy it’s really worth it again not interfere with joy and pleasure and feeling that.
[00:43] REENA JADHAV: And that’s actually why the health bootcamps which is our working day online virtual program in partnership with doctors like yourself works. People have across the board incredible results because of the bootcamp.
[00:54] DR. DEAN ORNISH: And you’ve probably seen in the first few days’ right?
[00:57] REENA JADHAV: Exactly. People feel amazing when they stick to it and then at the end of the 14 days they go like, now what I feel great I want to continue with this and we say great you have access keep going don’t stop now but it works.
[01:09] DR. DEAN ORNISH: Well that’s why I mean I have a nonprofit institute of Fargo Institute called The Preventive Medicine Research Institute which I founded back in 1984 after finishing my medical training in Boston to San Francisco. And through that we train 53 hospitals and clinics around the country at Harvard, at hospitals in New York, UCSF, inscrips and community hospitals and all the place. And we got again bigger changes in lifestyle, better clinical outcomes, bigger cost savings, better insurance. And some of the sites closed down and I said this is the best program we ever had like this we have to close it down because you don’t have insurance Medicare reimbursement. And so that was the people message is how so much of healthcare was really often disease care because of all about the Benjamin’s as the rappers would say or follow the money. So that sent me on a 16 year journey with Medicare because I realized I could do a thousand studies of a million people who will always remain a footnote unless we change reimbursement. So I had no idea it was going to take long to do that but we did. I mean at one point we even had to get a whole committee from the national heart, lung and blood institute to prove that it was it was not a dangerous behavior for people to walk and be actually to those meditating quit smoking compared to having a chest cut off they were obsessed by the answer.
[02:25] REENA JADHAV: Without harming them by asking them to eat well and walk more.
[02:28] DR. DEAN ORNISH: But hypothetically we had 8 randomized trials in cents and energy classes in fact they don’t work. They don’t prevent heart attacks, they don’t prevent prolonged life and we spent tens of billions of dollars every year on these procedures that are dangerous, invasive, expensive and largely ineffective and detrimental having a heart attack they could harm you and the vast majority of people are not and they do not work. So anyway I’m very grateful to Medicare because they created a new benefit category to cover our program and said we’ve been training I’ve been working with a company called Share Care to train hospitals and clinics and physician groups around the country and its working. Again we’re getting bigger changes in lifestyle, better clinical outcomes, bigger cost savings, better insurance. The cost is reimbursed at a fairly high level. It enables doctors to make a living doing this and they’re not really spending most of their time doing this. Some is the doctors the quarterback but here she is working with a meditation teacher, an exercise physiologist, a registered dietitian, a nurse and they work together as a team and the doctor overseas that but here she isn’t spending much of their time doing it. The Medicare is going to pay for 72 hours of training not just a ten minute visit we don’t have time to talk about much. People come twice a week for nine weeks ago for four hours at a time. It’s a lot an hour of exercise, an hour of stress management and an hour of support group and an hour of group lecture. And after they finish their nine weeks, their 72 hours they continue to be just like we’re doing today with you a video conferencing. So the one hour they can say okay every Thursday from five to six were all going to have our support group which is really what enables to get such high levels here. So as you have experienced from people who have gone through the bootcamp, they have these incredible experiences and transformations. And now by meeting once a week virtually, we can sustain that so that you know 85, we’re finding that 94% of the 72 hours are completed which is ridiculous. In a year even though it’s only nine weeks long a year later 85 to 95% that people are still following the program in every site that we train in our country.
[04:28] REENA JADHAV: That’s remarkable. Remarkable congratulations to you for speaking through the 16 years. It’s a long haul.
KEY LINKS:
CONTACT:
Dr. Dean Ornish, MD
Phone: 415-332-2525, x-229
Phone: +1 (877) 888-3091
Email: Tandis@pmri.org
WEBSITE:
deanornish.com
www.ornish.com
SOCIAL MEDIA:
www.facebook.com/Ornish
twitter.com/DeanOrnishMD
www.youtube.com/user/DrDeanOrnish
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