Living Time: Faith and Facts to Transform Your Cancer Journey
(Living Time is at once a personal odyssey, an intimate do...)
Living Time is at once a personal odyssey, an intimate doctor-patient communication, and a prescriptive guide for patients and their families. Writing with wit and humility, Dr. Bernadine Healy shares the hard-won insights that transformed her own struggle with a deadly cancer more than seven years ago, affirming her identity as patient and doctor with the many who share this journey.
Together with more than ten million survivors in the United States alone, Dr. Healy, former director of the National Institutes of Health, is a close witness to the medical advances that have brought us to a turning point in the war on cancer. This quiet revolution is curing a growing number of cancers and transforming many others from a death sentence to a chronic illness, one that calls for vigilance but not despair.
Beginning with her own compelling story, Dr. Healy interweaves it with one of the most lucid narratives ever written of what cancer is, how it works in our bodies, and how we can defeat it. She explains how genetic research and other new approaches are radically altering diagnosis and treatment, and she offers precise and empowering ways for patients and their families to access the information and support they need to secure the best in modern cancer care. She also underlines the urgency of accelerating the pace of research that could map out and destroy cancer in the twenty-first century.
Dr. Healy is forthright about the rigors of treatment and the toll cancer still takes, but readers will come away from her book with the information, resources, and heartfelt encouragement they need to look forward to a future with hope.
From the Hardcover edition.
Bernadine Patricia Healy was an American physician, cardiologist, academic.
Background
Bernadine Patricia Healy was born August 2, 1944, in New York City and grew up in Long Island City, Queens, New York. Her parents, second generation Irish-Americans, operated a small perfume business from the basement of their home. She was the second of Michael J. and Violet (McGrath) Healy's four daughters.
Education
Healy attended Hunter College High School, a prestigious public school in Manhattan and graduated first in her class. At Vassar College she majored in chemistry and minored in philosophy, graduating summa cum laude in 1965. One of ten women in a class of 120 at Harvard Medical School, she received her M. D. cum laude in 1970. Healy completed her internship and residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and spent two years at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at NIH.
Career
She returned to Johns Hopkins and worked her way up the academic ranks to professor of medicine. During these years, she also served as director of the coronary care unit (1977 - 1984) and assistant dean for post-doctoral programs and faculty development (1979 - 1984). From there, Healy served the Reagan Administration as deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
President George Bush nominated her for director of NIH in September 1990 and she was later confirmed by the U. S. Senate. Her tenure with NIH ended when incoming President Clinton appointed a new director in 1993.
Despite her various administrative posts, Healy has treated patients during much of her career. Her research has led to a deeper understanding of the pathology and treatment of heart attacks, especially in women. Healy demonstrated her administrative talents during her five-year directorship at the research institute of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation where research funding rose from eight million to thirty-six million dollars. Her responsibilities at the clinic, in addition to being a staff member of the cardiology department, involved directing the research of nine departments, including cancer, immunology, molecular biology, and cardiology.
Healy has manifested her talent and interest in shaping research policy through her many appointments to federal advisory panels, editorial boards of scientific journals, and other decision-making bodies. As the president of the American Heart Association she initiated pioneering research into women's heart disease and demonstrated that medical progress depends on the public and medical community's perception that there is a problem to be solved.
Previously, heart disease was perceived as a male affliction despite the fact that it kills more women than men. Medical practitioners for years treated women's heart disease far less aggressively than men's, and most research on coronary heart disease (like most other medical research) used male subjects either predominantly or exclusively. Healy has set out to "convince both the lay and medical sectors that coronary heart disease is also a woman's disease, not a man's disease in disguise, " she wrote in New England Journal of Medicine.
At the time that Healy was appointed director of the National Institutes of Health in 1991, the agency included thirteen research institutes, sixteen thousand employees, a research budget of over nine billion dollars, and was a world leader in bio-medical research. Yet when Healy assumed control, the agency was beset with problems, its effectiveness was in decline, and it had been without a permanent director for twenty months. Scientists were leaving in record numbers because of non-competitive salaries, politicization of scientific agendas (a prime example was the ban on fetal-tissue research because the Republican administration believed it encouraged abortion), and congressional investigations into alleged cases of scientific misconduct. The agency had been accused of sexism and racism in hiring and promotion. Low morale and bureaucratization added to the institute's problematic image.
Healy brought an aggressive and visible management style to the NIH. Her appointment was viewed positively by many because of her outstanding experience in dealing with science policy issues. In addition, because she had been a member of a panel that advised continuation of fetal-tissue research, her appointment was also seen as a move away from politicized science. She also held a series of "town meetings" with NIH scientists to pinpoint problems and form committees to make recommendations concerning NIH research priorities.
Furthermore, she initiated a large scale study of the effects of vitamin supplementation, hormone replacement therapy, and dietary modification on women between the ages of forty-five and seventy-nine. She established a policy whereby the NIH would fund only those clinical trials that included both men and women when the condition being studied affected both genders.
She has written a book on the subject of women's health care, A New Prescription For Women's Health: Getting the Best Medical Care in a Man's World(1995). Healy's policy decisions at times proved controversial. For example, Healy charged the NIH Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI), whose job it was to investigate ethical matters, with improper conduct, including leaking confidential information and failing to protect the rights of scientists being investigated. In response, the head of OSI accused Healy of mishandling a scientific misconduct case at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. The allegations led to a hearing in 1991 in which Healy vigorously defended herself, as well as the changes that she had implemented at OSI. Another controversy involved gene patenting. Despite the objections of Nobel Laureate James Watson, head of NIH's human genome project, Healy approved patent applications for 347 genes. A third controversy strained her relationship with the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues. Healy lobbied against provisions in a congressional bill concerning the NIH that would make the inclusion of women and minorities in clinical studies a legal requirement, arguing that it represented "micro-management" of NIH. Attempting to negotiate a political compromise on another issue, she lobbied against overturning the Bush Administration's ban on fetal tissue research, despite her previous support for such research.
Among her achievements at mid-career point is her success in pointing out and undermining the subtle but pervasive bias against women in medical research. Healy continues to provoke both criticism and praise for the vocal stances and decisive actions that have defined her career.
(Living Time is at once a personal odyssey, an intimate do...)
Views
Healy has described herself as a life-long Republican and a feminist. She credits her father's belief in the importance of education for girls as the reason for her enrollment in an academically competitive high school-an unorthodox move for a Catholic girl during that era. In both medical school at Harvard and during her career at Johns Hopkins she was forced to deal with incidents of sexism.
Quotations:
As she told Erik Eckholm of the New York Times, "I guess I tended to see those administrative issues, often seen as dreary work burdens, in terms of their broader policy implications. "
Membership
She was a member of the national Academy of Engineering; the Department of Energy, NASA, and the National Institutes of Health and others.
Personality
Her colleagues at Johns Hopkins described her as someone who often challenged conventional wisdom and created new directions in research. In addition, unlike many scientists and physicians, Healy viewed management positions as important and challenging.
Connections
Healy has been married to cardiologist Floyd D. Loop since 1985. With Loop she has a daughter, Marie McGrath Loop; her other daughter, Bartlett Ann Bulkley, is from her previous marriage to surgeon George Bulkley, whom she divorced in 1981.