HEAL THE HEALERS NOW Initiative in the USA

29 Sep 2020

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Nurse with a mask

HEAL THE HEALERS NOW Initiative in the USA

Providing Transcendental Meditation® to Medical Providers battling Covid-19

Heal the Healers Now brings the Transcendental Meditation® technique to medical providers who are battling the coronavirus pandemic. The initiative was launched on April 6, 2020 by the Center for Health and Wellness of the David Lynch Foundation and the US TM® Organisation.

Interview with Dr Stuart Rothenberg, MD, FAAFP, Medical Director of the Heal the Healers Now initiative, National Director of the Transcendental Meditation Health Professionals Program, National Medical Director of Maharishi AyurVeda Association of America, and Adjunct Professor of Ayurvedic Medicine at Maharishi International University.

Dr Rothenberg says that “the COVID pandemic had suspended virtually all teaching of TM in the United States. But we saw the terrible stress that the frontline healthcare providers were dealing with. The US TM® organisation and the David Lynch Foundation (DLF) came up with the idea to rollout an Initiative specifically focused on the healthcare professionals. We named it Heal the Healers Now.

We came up with that idea at the beginning of April and at the same time Bob Roth, the CEO of DLF, was invited onto one of the biggest morning TV talk shows in the US called Good Morning America. The co-hosts of that show are already practicing TM. Bob used the opportunity to announce the Heal the Healers Now initiative on national TV. The result was a huge wave of interest from hundreds of doctors, nurses, emergency medical technicians as well as a number of medical centres, hospitals and leading medical schools.”

Dr Rothenberg gave more details about the Heal the Healers Now initiative.

“The offer is very simple: teach the healthcare workers on the front lines of the COVID crisis the Healthcare Provider Wellness programme based on Transcendental Meditation at no cost to them. It will be paid for through donations that are raised locally with matching grants from the David Lynch Foundation.

Our focus on funding now is for programmes being organised in healthcare institutions, such as hospitals and medical centres.

There are two levels of projects within this initiative:

Large projects to conduct randomised controlled studies at selected academic medical centres. Formal proposals for Randomised Control Trials on TM and Healthcare Provider Burnout in Front Line Healthcare Workers have been submitted to Duke University Medical Center and the University of California at Irvine Medical Center, and others are in planning.
TM centres across the country have been invited to launch local projects with frontline healthcare workers. That has been set-up as a matching grant, with the David Lynch Foundation contributing equal funds to what is raised locally. Special reduced pricing from the national TM organisation is in place for this initiative. For instance, $10,000 raised locally would be matched with $10,000 from DLF, which would be enough to teach 33 individual healthcare workers, including doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, and emergency medical technicians. Even support staff who are not necessarily direct healthcare providers but who are exposed to the virus would be eligible.”

It’s a wonderful opportunity to help people and also to showcase what TM can do, especially to support these heroic individuals who have been helping others and are now suffering because of it.