Dean Ornish was in his second year of medical school in Houston when he asked his supervisor for referrals to heart patients. It was 1977, and Ornish wanted to launch a study looking at the effects of yoga and a vegetarian diet on patients with heart disease.
The supervising physician's response was: "Should I say I'm referring patients to a swami?"
Sixteen years later, when Ornish met with a director of Medicare - a chain-smoking, 280-pound man - to see whether his holistic approach to treating heart disease could be covered under the program, he was told, "If we do this, anyone with a crystal and a pyramid will want us to pay for what they do."
But just this past month, Medicare finally gave approval to Ornish's program of a plant-based diet, meditation, exercise and support groups to treat heart disease.
It was a crowning achievement for the Sausalito physician, best-selling author and health guru, who's come a long way from his geek days as an introverted boy in Dallas. Now, the clinical professor of medicine at UCSF stands as the nation's pre-eminent proponent of adopting a healthy life to reverse chronic diseases.
Since founding the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in 1984, he has run trial after trial looking at whether lifestyle choices involving diet, exercise, meditation - and even love - can be as powerful in treating disease as drugs, radiation, chemotherapy and surgery.
"In my 33 years, in everything we did, people thought we were crazy," said Ornish, a self-described hugger who exudes a doctor's natural air of concern. "People said the tests must be wrong or that this could only happen in California. But we have proven that lifestyle is treatment, not just prevention."
Newsweek cover
Instead of having his ideas dismissed, Ornish even found himself on the cover of Newsweek. The headline: "Can this man save your heart? How Dean Ornish is shaking up medicine."
Mark Hyman, a personal physician to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, is one of many in the medical establishment who have been won over by Ornish's research.
"Everyone knows that it is good to eat well and exercise, but few people know that if you apply these same things to people who are already sick, you can reverse it," said Hyman, a board member of the Institute for Functional Medicine, which trains health care providers and stresses personalized medicine and prevention.
"Dean's work is not about looking at a drug to treat a person, but looking at treating the person. He should get the Nobel Prize for using research to show we can reverse chronic disease and showing we can change our gene expression."
Ornish sees his own success as part perseverance, part timing. "There is a growing acceptance of the validity of these approaches," he said.
His research studies have come a long way from his first trial in 1977. That was when the second-year medical student interested in the impact of yoga and a vegetarian diet on heart disease finally talked a supervisor into referring heart patients to him.
"The first study, involving seven men and three women, lasted for one month because we had hotel rooms donated for a month," he said. "I taught yoga and lectured, and ran the support groups. It was me and the cook." At the end of the month, "there was a 91 percent reduction in angina or chest pain and a significant increase in blood flow to the heart."
The results were met with skepticism.
The next study involved 48 men and women, also with severe heart disease. This study lasted 28 days, and the results were similarly positive. Then a five-year study, funded through the National Institutes of Health, found added improvements with the added time.
"In short, the people who went through our intensive lifestyle program got better, and people in the control group who made moderate or no changes got worse," said Ornish, who is a physician consultant to former President Bill Clinton.
In the late 1990s, Ornish turned to prostate cancer. In collaboration with Peter Carroll, head of urology at UCSF, Ornish divided 93 men into two groups: one that would make lifestyle changes and one that would do what they wanted. The results, published in 2005, showed that prostate cancer was slowed, stopped or perhaps reversed among those following Ornish's program.
5-year study
In August, Ornish will wrap up a five-year study, also in collaboration with Carroll, comparing two groups of men with prostate cancer: 30 who treated their cancer with Ornish's approach and 30 who did their own thing. (All 60 men had biopsy-proven prostate cancer and all chose "active surveillance" over chemotherapy or radiation.)
"I have deep gratitude every day," said Ornish, author of six best-selling books. "Not long ago, I was in the kitchen at home and the sun was streaming through and I said, 'I feel so happy and grateful I need to make sure I'm not dreaming.' "
It wasn't always that way.
