In conversation with Luke Coutinho
& Samara Mahindra
LUKE COUTINHO and SAMARA MAHINDRA share their experiences of working with cancer patients using an integrative, holistic approach, involving the best of both worlds. They incorporate medical treatment and lifestyle changes to bring about the optimum possibility for wellbeing.
Q: Luke and Samara, welcome. Luke, your field is Integrative and Lifestyle Medicine, and Samara you are a Holistic Life Coach. Let’s start by understanding what you both do. Samara?
SM: I got into this field about six years ago, because I lost my mother to cancer. Integrative medicine is nothing but looking at a holistic lifestyle for the betterment of your health. We look at nutrition, movement, mind-body therapy, sleep patterns, career, relationships etc. It is the entirety of a lifestyle instead of just looking at one aspect of health and well-being.
Q: What about you Luke?
LC: I figured out a long time ago that I didn’t just want to work with symptoms in my patients. I believe that it is possible to get to the root cause using the intelligence of the human body. In Integrative and Lifestyle Medicine we need good doctors, and we need good medicines to be prescribed the right way, for the right reasons.
So we have the patient or client in the center. Then we have a doctor who is required for whatever disease the patient has, and a nutritionist who looks at the food the person eats, and you may have an emotional healer or therapist if the person has emotional issues, because we believe in the mind-body concept. There cannot be healing in the human body unless there is progressive healing in the mind.
Sometimes you may need a physiotherapist if movement is a problem. A lot of people say, “Don’t move when you are sick,” but activity and movement create blood circulation. Sometimes you may have an exercise physiologist to help with circulation when you are bedridden.
So a holistic approach has the best interests of the patient in the center. You have everything that you need that contributes to the vision of the healing of the patient at the root cause level. You don’t want the patient to come back with the same issue in the future, or other issues resulting from the previous disease. We want to give them the assistance to heal and sustain their health for the rest of their lives.
Q: So are you saying that it is not enough to treat the symptoms of that disease, but lifestyle changes are also needed to allow changes to happen for the person?
LC: Absolutely.
Q: What sort of people do you work with?
LC: Initially, when I started using this approach in Bombay, it was predominantly for weight loss. People saw being overweight as a disease, but when I further diagnosed their problems the causes would be things like a slow liver, or cirrhosis of the liver, or issues with the heart, or an acidic body, because you can’t lose weight when the body is acidic.
You have everything that you need that contributes to the vision of the healing of the patient at the root cause level. You don’t want the patient to come back with the same issue in the future, or other issues resulting from the previous disease. We want to give them the assistance to heal and sustain their health for the rest of their lives.
And from there I moved on to cancer patients in a very surprising way. I had four patients come to me with less than a week to live. Their doctor had said, “There is nothing you can do. Just meet a nutritionist and eat some good food, and enjoy your last few days.” So I went through their blood reports and one thing stood out: they had extremely low immunity. These patients had been treated for three years, having surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, but nothing had been done for their immunity.
I spent a week boosting their immune systems, as their bodies were malnourished, and two of those patients lived on for four and a half years while the other two are still living today. I am talking about pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, and there was no magic in what I did. I just figured I needed to boost their immune systems.
Since then, my practice has changed, so that now 98% of the work I do is with cancer patients. Initially, doctors would send people to me who were in the fourth stage of cancer, but today I have patients who are in the first stage and there is the full range in between. We work with doctors to figure out the best holistic model for each person. And now I have patients in Czechoslovakia, Russia, America, etc. We started programs and they are doing well, so it is working. And what is working is that we are connecting mind and body through a holistic approach.
Q: Do you also treat cancer patients Samara?
SM: Yes, very much so. As I said, I got into this field for personal reasons, and I work primarily with cancer patients. The space that I specialize in is post-treatment, so my patients have been through conventional treatment and work with me basically to integrate lifestyle changes.
Q: What sort of lifestyle changes do you bring about?
SM: So like Luke, it is very holistic. Predominantly I work with integrating nutrition, movement and mindbody therapies, to change lifestyle. The idea is to reduce the risk of relapse. What happens is that a lot of people go through treatment and they think, “That’s it!” and go back to an unhealthy lifestyle. They live how they were living before, and that will increase the risk of relapse. We are trying to change that.
Q: Both of you mentioned mind-body medicine, which is a huge field in medicine today. Companies have realized that billions of dollars are being lost in productivity and absenteeism as a result of stress. So what are the techniques you use to help people with their minds, and to develop calm and peace, to have more positive thoughts, especially in the healing process?
LC: I write out about 30 to 40 prescriptions in a day, and it is meditation and pranayama at the start of every prescription. Even when someone claims that they are not stressed, someone who does not accept that an emotion from childhood or a relationship could cause stress, or financial problems, or losing a job, I still encourage them to do meditation and pranayama, because I have seen that they work.
We all study the placebo effect in medicine. We all know how it works – the mind comes first. If a doctor in a white coat gives you a sugar pill and says your headache is going to go, it is going to go, even though it is a sugar pill. We need to teach people how to create that balance and peace in their own minds that then affects the human body.
I was exposed to meditation about thee years ago during my first trip to Hyderabad, when a teacher came up to me and said, “You are absorbing all of the emotions of your patients.” I realized the amount of negative emotion I was absorbing, so I got into meditation and learnt how to focus on my breath, and I felt better, I could focus on what I had to do and on my personal life as well.
Meditation is now the most important part of my treatment… You have your physical self, your mental and intellectual self, your emotional self and your spiritual self, and today most people are not growing in all of those selves. So in Integrative Medicine, we try to combine them so we grow in all these selves.
When I saw what it could do for me, I thought about what it could do for someone who really has a serious problem. So I started offering meditation to my patients as well. I tied up with a lot of yoga therapists who worked with me on cases, and it was fantastic. I could work on nutrition and they would handle the mind, and the healing was beautiful. Even if the person was only going to live for another two months, we would make sure they would live a quality life, and not in and out of hospitals.
And then I came across Heartfulness meditation: I met one of the trainers at an event, and just the way she told me how it worked, and arranged for someone to come over to my place and give me the three introductory sessions, it was all so simple. With Heartfulness meditation, I could literally take the concept with me everywhere.
I was with a patient at the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She was getting the best treatment available, but she was so disillusioned, so a trainer in New York did a couple of Heartfulness meditation sessions with her, and she felt so good. Her whole outlook changed. She was able to go out walking in the streets instead of just focusing on the disease. Someone else in New Jersey had a knee replacement and was completely demoralized, and a Heartfulness trainer was able to help. These people get back to me and say, “It works, it’s awesome.”
Meditation is now the most important part of my treatment. At the same time, I also know that if you have a weak physical body, you can’t meditate. So it is the mind-body connect, or you can call it the body-mind connect; both ways it is equal. You have your physical self, your mental and intellectual self, your emotional self and your spiritual self, and today most people are not growing in all of those selves. So in Integrative Medicine, we try to combine them so we grow in all these selves.
Today people are growing intellectually, so they try to diagnose their own cancer using Google. But that also brings a lot of worry and fear. Technology has moved so fast that humans are not able to keep up with it, and that gap creates negative emotions and fear. We need technology, but the gap is too much right now.
So when you put all these integrative approaches together, that is what I believe is the foundation of healing. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes I question myself: “Why am I trying to fight the laws of Nature to keep someone alive?” So sometimes we just have to let it be. We do what we can and let it be.
Every time I sit with a patient, I can figure out what has caused the disease. It is easy to blame the environment, but we are all breathing the same air. It is also easy to blame food, but most of us eat the same food. It finally comes down to other root causes, such as an antibiotic course that was very badly handled. These are all diseases of immunity. So we really come down to simple things that don’t have to be what Google says.
In a study done with our own cancer patients, 86% of women’s breast cancers were initiated as a result of emotional distress. How did we find that out? We don’t give our patients two minutes of time. A consultation with a patient can be anywhere between half and hour and two hours. We ask every question we need to. And when we discover the start of the cancer, we always find that it happened at the most traumatic time in that person’s life with internalized emotions.
The truth is that there is a connection between mind and body. Meditation works for me, but for those people who do not want to meditate they can always do deep breathing, as deep breathing centers you and balances your cortisol levels, your oxygen levels, as that is how the human body is designed. Your breath aligns you. People have different ways of coping, but ultimately meditation brings you back to your true self, so it is an integral part of my healing.
To be continued ...
Interviewed by ELIZABETH DENLEY
