Events -- Deepak Chopra Severance Hall Lecture

Opening Remarks by Helen Moss

My name is Helen Moss and I am the Founder of the Helen Moss Breast Cancer Research Foundation. I want to welcome all of you to this lecture and thank you for coming.

Almost 4 years ago, I was lying in the hospital, sick and depressed, having just undergone cancer surgery and the removal of my breast. A few weeks before, I had been told by an upbeat surgeon that just by looking at me he could tell that I had a 95% chance of cure. When the very cheerful young resident came into my hospital room dressed in a spiffy copy of an Armani suit, I asked him if he had gotten the pathology report, specifically if any lymph nodes were involved. I was worried, notwithstanding my 95% prediction of cure. He stopped smiling, hesitated, and said, “15 out 16 lymph nodes positive – metastatic breast cancer”; He turned and immediately walked out of the room. In shock I said, “I’m a dead woman.” I was not a survivor at that point. The next thing I said to my very competent daughter-in-law who was in the room. (My son had the good sense to marry a woman like his mother) “Tell my husband to go out and get me another opinion and you go out and bring in that surgeon immediately.” I became a survivor from that point on, and I founded the H Moss Breast Cancer Research Foundation at that instant.

What is our mission? Our mission is to nurture and to educate a community of healers, to treat the entire patient in a holistic fashion, including the integration of Comprehensive and Alternative Cancer Care with mainstream treatments. Furthermore, we dedicate ourselves to cooperate in every way with institutions and organizations that share this commitment. When my husband, Richard Fleischman, and I heard Dr. Chopra in Bangalore, India at the International Conference on Holistic Medicine, I knew we had to bring him to Cleveland to challenge our way of looking at traditional health care.

In the early days of medicine, a holistic practice was common. However with the advent of the scientific method in western medicine, a great breakthrough in the treatment of disease, treating the patient in his or her entirety became lost. However, due to patient demand, this practice is being resurrected, with doctor and patient working together

We encourage the medical profession to adhere once again to the words of a nationally recognized, a Pulitzer Prize winner and pioneering Cleveland physician, America’s first brain surgeon, who was born in 1869 and died in 1939. His name is Dr. Harvey Cushing, in whose family home here in Cleveland my husband and I reside.

He said, “A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man – he must view the man in his world.” And Helen Moss has added, “...and the woman in her world.”

I encourage you to join our Foundation. The information is in your program. Thank you.