The Institute for Spirituality and Health at the Texas Medical Center

This event, schedule for Tuesday, May 22, at noon, has been cancelled due to the accidental death of seven members of Radhanath Swami's Ashram in India.  Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families involved and to Swami's entire community.  The event will be rescheduled in the near future.  At that time he will speak at ISH on "Spirituality in Healthcare." He says “Medicine should not just be looked at as a profession, but as a way for improving people’s life.”

These are the words of Radhanath Swami, who regularly speaks on the benefits of Bhakti-yoga throughout India, Europe and North America to heads of state, corporate leaders, health care professionals and the international yoga community. Having inspired the formation of a Spiritual Care Department at the Bhaktivedanta Hospital, he was invited by the Association of Medical Consultants to address leading physicians in Mumbai on "Spirituality in Healthcare".

I am pleased to announce we now have in print the story of our 57 year history in the Texas Medical Center - Uniting Faith, Medicine, and Healthcare: A 57-Year Hisotry of the Institute for Spirituality and Health at the Texas Medical Center.  The author, Cathey Nickell, has done an outstanding job of interviewing dozens of people and putting their oral history together with recorded minutes of meetings and other documents to create a most enjoyable read.  

A quote on the back of the book by Denton Cooley, M.D., says it all:  "From a career of sixty-plus years, I can say unequivocally that patients with strong faith consistently recover better than those without spiritual strength.  This history of the Institute for Spirituality and Health offers a wealth of knowledge and insight into this fact."  

I recently visited with Mark Wallace, President/CEO to invite Texas Children's Hospital to become a member of ISH's Circle of Friends which he happily agreed to do.  He said he had something he wanted me to show me -- a Prayer Bowl which was a gift to him from his staff when they opened the new Pavillion for Women.  In the large bowl was a hundred or more cards, each with a prayer for Mark Wallace.  He said, "Take one and read it."  I did and was blessed.  He said every day he picks a card from his Prayer Bowl and is blessed to read one of the prayers that was prayed for him.

Next, I was taken to see the Chapel in Texas Children's Hospital.  I was stunned by its beauty and the story is a young girl designed it.  The chapel is round and the ceiling is painted with a starry sky above.  When I arrived there were two nurses kneeling and praying.  My guide, Nancy Gordon, said they were probably praying for one or more of their patients.  I was blessed.

The New York Times, Sunday Review, The Opinion Pages, April 15, 2012, by Nicholas D. Kristof  

An American soldier dies every day and a half, on average, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Veterans kill themselves at a rate of one every 80 minutes. More than 6,500 veteran suicides are logged every year — more than the total number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq combined since those wars began.

These unnoticed killing fields are places like New Middletown, Ohio, where Cheryl DeBow raised two sons, Michael and Ryan Yurchison, and saw them depart for Iraq. Michael, then 22, signed up soon after the 9/11 attacks.  “I can’t just sit back and do nothing,” he told his mom. Two years later, Ryan followed his beloved older brother to the Army.

When Michael was discharged, DeBow picked him up at the airport — and was staggered. “When he got off the plane and I picked him up, it was like he was an empty shell,” she told me. “His body was shaking.” Michael began drinking and abusing drugs, his mother says, and he terrified her by buying the same kind of gun he had carried in Iraq. “He said he slept with his gun over there, and he needed it here,” she recalls.