This is the last of three stories featuring presenters at OU-COM’s 3rd Annual Continuing Medical Education Conference and All Class Reunion, which starts Oct. 1. Today is featured Bernie Siegel, M.D., the keynote speaker for this year’s conference, who will speak at Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium Friday evening. Earlier in the week we featured Karen Thomas, D.O. (’96), and Mitchell Silver, D.O. (’89). (Links to the previous stories are at the bottom of this page.) The CME/All Class Reunion brings back alumni to Athens for three days of continuing medical education seminars, reunites classmates and makes new colleagues and friends. For more information, call (740) 593-2176 or e-mail Sharon Zimmerman, director of alumni affairs.

By Brooke Bunch

Bernie Siegel, M.D., believes in the power of love.

Siegel, the keynote speaker at OU-COM’s CME Conference and All Class Reunion, embraces a philosophy that love, hope and respect are just as important to prolonging lives as medical science. His books, “Love, Medicine and Miracles,” published in 1986; “Peace, Love and Healing,” in 1989; and “How to Live Between Office Visits,” in 1993, have broken new ground in the field of healing.

On Saturday, Oct. 2, Siegel will be making the noontime keynote presentation, “The Psychology of Illness and the Art of Healing,” at reunion conference.

According to Siegel, a lot is to be said about the power of love. He says those who grow up feeling loved by their parents treat themselves differently. In addition, something as simple as owning a pet can improve one’s mortality rate following a heart attack.

“I will be talking to health professionals about all the things they didn’t learn during their training,” Siegel says. “They get a lot of information but not an education on how to care for themselves and their patients. I will also be speaking to patients. I hope to empower all of them and help them to survive, show them how to deal with loss and how to accept mortality. But also I will speak to doing what you love and how to enjoy caring for people.”

Siegel says he will share with them with all the wisdom he has learned from those who have learned the hard way.

“It’s a lot easier if someone tells you how to deal with life before you run into it yourself,” he says. “I hope to teach them how to play the game. I try to inspire people rather than inform them.”

In 1978 Bernie founded Exceptional Cancer Patients (ECaP), an individual and group therapy based on “carefrontation,” a loving, safe, therapeutic confrontation enabling everyone to understand his or her healing potential. He has written extensively about the mind-body connection in medicine, encouraging patients to take an active role in the healing process.

Siegel says one of the good things about osteopathic medicine is that osteopathic students are required to touch their patients while being trained.

“You can be a M.D. and never touch anyone unless you’re examining them,” Siegel says. “Those in osteopathic medicine do touch people, and it makes a difference in how they treat their patients.” 

Siegel attended Colgate University and Cornell University Medical College, where he graduated with honors. His surgical training took place at Yale New Haven Hospital and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. He practiced general and pediatric surgery until retiring in 1989.

He lives in the New Haven, Conn., area. He and wife, Bobbie, have written many articles together and have five children and many pets.

Siegel will also be holding a workshop for students, interns and residents at the Margaret M. Walter Hall prior to his noontime presentation. The workshop, “The Real Reasons for Becoming a Doctor and Art is Medicine,” begins at 8:30 a.m.

Siegel also will give a lecture, “A Prescription for Life,” at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 1, at Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium. The lecture is open to the Athens community. A book sale and signing follows Siegel’s lecture.

For more information on the conference, call (740) 593-2176 or e-mail zimmerms@ohio.edu.