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Mind/body medicine and spirituality: a new vision of healing.

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asked if faith heals, medical psychologist Joann Duffy, who deals with patients' responses to and anxieties about their ill. nesses, replied, "I think it depends on how you define 'heal.'"

The recent life and health experiences of Wheaton Franciscan Sr. Jane Madejczyk may help provide a definition. More than that, Madejczyk's successful search for an "integrated physician" opens up a second discussion: the new dimension in medical care today through the growing influence of the spirituality of healing and mind/body medicine on mainstream medical practice.

Beginning with Duffy and Madejczyk, NCR looks at this new dimension's challenges and promises through patients, individual practitioners and scientists.

Madejczyk, senior vice president at Wheaton Franciscan Services corporate office in Wheaton, Ill., described her everyday workload in terms familiar to modern Americans, as "the worst work of a corporate executive: very busy, lots of time on the road, lots of meetings, lots of days back-to-back where you come in in the morning, go all the way down to the end of the day and get home.

"After a very long day you make something to eat, maybe stay conscious for a little while, then fall asleep. And do the same thing the next day," she said.

Then came the diagnosis: breast cancer. "And this pushes me into a place inside myself: What is happening to me? Not in an accusing way. From the perspective of curiosity: Why is this happening to me?"

But, said Madejczyk, "the experience I'd had with my own physician whom I'd been seeing for 10 years was just horrific. I mean she was a woman who couldn't give me any advice other than lots of technology, lots of chemo, lots of radiation. And I did all of that.

When Madejczyk, now in remission, pondered her life, it "came...

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