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.