Fashion Icon Takes On Medicine

May 9, 2007 — -- Donna Karan long ago established herself as a force in the fashion world. Now she's poised to revolutionize alternative medicine.

Next week, she'll host the Urban Zen Initiative's Well-Being Forum, a gathering of some of the nation's leading physicians and practitioners of alternative medicine. Their goal: to make hospitals more about healing the whole patient.

Karan wants to create a less stoic, more welcoming medical environment. One of the first items on her agenda: gracing hospital gowns with her signature style.

"I cannot wait to redesign hospital gowns," she said, talking about the mortifying, backless, paper-thin robes. "We're intimidated. Now is that good for our disease? No. So there has to be a better way."

Cause Close to Home

Karan's ultimate goal is to create centers for patient advocacy and alternative healing, both in and outside of hospitals. The cause is one close to her heart. In 1995, Stephan Weiss, her husband and business partner, was diagnosed with lung cancer. The shock was overwhelming for Karan and Weiss, a nonsmoker.

"We would lay in bed and he'd say, 'Donny, we can look at this two different ways. We could be sad about it and get ourselves really upset. Or we can put our mind to it and look at the positive,'" she said.

They battled his cancer with conventional treatment and alternative remedies like herbal treatments and yoga.

"The surgeons were brilliant and the chemotherapy, the radiation," Karan said. "But it became very, very apparent to me that there was more to his care than just what was being offered at a hospital level."

Karan said that yoga helped Weiss breathe and infused his lungs with new life.

"His yoga teacher was there and realigned his body. It's as simple as kind of like sitting here and telling the patient, 'Okay, open your chest, breathe,'" she said. "He had a pillow that erected him and opened up his lungs."

To Karan, the difference was clear. But the cancer proved too vicious to overcome and Weiss died six years after the diagnosis. The battle led Karan to think about how hospitals approach illness and healing.

"Nurses are so busy, doctors are very busy and specialists," she said. "You know, if you have multiple forms of cancer…whether it's your brain cancer or lung cancer or your cancer has spread, you go, 'Where do I go? Who do I listen to?' Your parents, your family members don't even know what to do."

Karan's dream is for every hospital to have a place where patients can go to get nutritious meals, yoga lessons and alternative therapies -- in addition to traditional medicine.

"Could you imagine if there was someone who would take that patient out…after it's diagnosed, and take them on their journey and be able to embrace all aspects of the possibilities of what they can have? But not only the patient, but their loved ones as well," she said.

"Offer sort of the menu of what's offered to them," she continued. "And then while the patient is in the hospital, physically, emotionally give the patient the tools that's needed to really help them heal themselves. That in itself will help so much."