I was the daughter of a North Carolina physician. A great number of my father’s patients could not afford health insurance, and some of them did not believe in transfusions or surgery for religious reasons. He saw many of them in our home, and I vividly recall how he would spend time with them there and in his office, learning about who they were as people, not just body parts with diseases. He asked about their loved ones, their jobs, what they did to relax, what their concerns were and how they found joy in their lives. He donated his services to high school sports teams and cared for his friends’ children at no charge when they became sick or injured. His form of philanthropy was about sharing his love for medicine with his patients.

My exposure to his compassion for his patients and his passion for medicine has served as a great foundation for my work in philanthropy. After we married and John had become a successful businessman, we found ourselves in a position to provide financial support to others. For me, philanthropy is not about giving back. It is about sharing a part of who you are, whether it is your wealth or your wisdom, experience, knowledge, talent, skill or something as simple as a smile.

Over the years, I have experienced life-changing events—some dealt with health, others with self-discovery. It was these experiences that led me to the role I now play in helping to advance the practice of integrative medicine. I realized that, in order to heal on any level after any type of crisis, one needs to understand, embrace and work with the connectedness of mind, body, spirit and community. I arrived at a new understanding of how people and events affect one another on an energetic level, and how critical it is to understand the wholeness of who we are in order to heal.

These realizations were my catalyst for action. I studied Reiki, an ancient form of Japanese energy healing, received my mastership and became interested in working toward bringing an understanding of the mind-body-spirit-community connection back into patient care. Through the Christy and John Mack Foundation, founded in 1993, we financed Reiki programs at the pediatric oncology department at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at New York-Presbyterian’s Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. It is gratifying to see what this modality has done to improve the care of both patients and health practitioners.

Collaborative Efforts
One of the most profound experiences of my life was the last night I spent in 2000 with my good friend Susan, who was in the hospital dying from leukemia. I spent the night helping her accept the inevitability of her death and connecting to her in a way that was emotionally profound in its sadness, and yet breathtakingly sacred in its perfection. That night broke my heart, it strengthened my soul and affirmed my resolve to effect systemic change in our delivery of care, whether it is designed for those who are healthy, convalescing or receiving palliative care.

Integrative medicine was just coming into its own at the time, and I began to support its emergence through our foundation. Leaders like Ralph Snyderman, MD, Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, Dean Ornish, MD, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, had been working within the healthcare system and with medical schools to effect just such a change. They envisioned a new medicine that was patient-centered and treated the whole person—body, mind, spirit and community. It is a medicine that concentrates on prevention first. It educates and empowers patients to be proactive and responsible for their own health and wellness, and combines the very best of scientifically proven complementary and alternative modalities with the very best of Western technology for the individuation of care.

In 2001, we were working on our own to perpetuate change based on this model of care. During that time, Penny George, a breast cancer survivor, invited John and me to attend a remarkable meeting with a small group of dedicated philanthropists and leading physicians in the field of integrative medicine. The meeting raised two questions: Could a group of philanthropists working together to fund strategic programs aimed at systems-change accomplish more than the individual philanthropists working alone? Did the field of integrative medicine hold some of the answers to our healthcare system’s problems? We all agreed that the answer to both those questions was a resounding yes.

Not long after that, Penny and I helped cofound an operating foundation, the Bravewell Collaborative. In testament to the strength of collaboration, in five short years the foundation has made incredible progress, including the development of a PBS documentary, The New Medicine, sponsored by Twin Cities Public Television and produced by Emmy Award–winner Middlemarch Films. Hosted by Dana Reeve, it aired in March 2006 on 516 stations in all 50 states and received a nomination for a Peabody Award.

Improving Outcomes
During our first year, we received a pro bono study by McKinsey & Co. (valued at $1 million) that analyzed the fundamental issues confronting integrative medicine. Based on those findings, we established the Bravewell Clinical Network, a group of eight leading centers across the country that deliver integrative medicine; we are currently helping these centers achieve sustainability. With our help, the Bravewell Clinical Network is also in the process of establishing the first-ever practice-based research network in integrative medicine, which will provide much-needed data in support of integrative medicine becoming the standard of care.

Nearly 80 percent of patients in the study safely avoided coronary bypass surgery or angioplasty by participating in an integrative medicine program.

My fellow philanthropists in the Bravewell Collaborative also recognized that changing the way physicians were educated was the key to changing the culture of medicine. So we funded the infrastructure of the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine. Beginning as a group of six institutions, the network has grown in five years to include 36 highly esteemed medical schools that work to further integrative medicine. We also support a post-graduate clinical fellowship in collaboration with an integrative medicine program at the University of Arizona; we have awarded 52 fellowships.

Every movement and every cause needs leadership, so we established the Bravewell Leadership Award, a $100,000 award given every two years, that honors a leader in integrative medicine. We gave the first award in 2003. In November, we’ll honor six of the early leaders in the field with the Bravewell Pioneers of Integrative Medicine Award at a gala in New York.

Integrative medicine is now proving its real worth. By way of example, coronary heart disease is preventable in approximately 95 percent of people by simply changing nine health factors—all of which are related to diet and lifestyle, according to research published in The Lancet. Mind-body therapies such as relaxation techniques, imagery, biofeedback and hypnosis are used effectively by more than 30 percent of the adult U.S. population to treat conditions such as coronary heart disease, pain and anxiety. And a Mutual of Omaha study done in the 1990s reported that nearly 80 percent of patients enrolled in the study safely avoided coronary bypass surgery or angioplasty by participating in an integrative medicine program, which saved almost $30,000 per patient in the first year.

My passion for life’s interconnectedness and its relationship to health defines my life. Our family foundation funded the creation and construction of a 27,000-square-foot building on the Duke University Center for Living campus to house Duke Integrative Medicine, a philosophy of practice owned by the entire Duke University Health System. I am honored to serve as founding chair for its National Board of Advisors. Philanthropy is about sharing. I am grateful to be able to participate in something that will outlast me.

Photograph by Thomas Hart Shelby.