Posted Tuesday, June 22, 2004

By Ron Barnett
STAFF WRITER
rbarnett@greenvillenews.com

Robin Davenport felt like she had lost control of her life a few years ago when she was taking treatment for cancer. She started reading books, learning about alternative medical approaches to healing.

"There was something I was being driven to do but I didn't know what," she said.

She found what she was looking for when she stumbled on a Web site about a program called Healing Journeys. She read a story about Jan Adrian, of Sacramento, Calif., and about how she had survived breast cancer and found ways to heal the mind and spirit as well as the body in the aftermath of the disease.

Long story short: At Davenport's request, Adrian is in Greenville this week, setting up a conference at Furman University next year to teach people about going from "surviving to thriving" with cancer. Similar conferences she's held around the country generally draw about 1,200 people.

Dayatra Baker-White, executive director of the Phillis Wheatley Center, an endorser of the conference, said she hopes it will raise awareness of cancer in the black community. She said survival rates of cancer, especially prostate and breast cancer, are much lower than those of the overall population.

"Anything we can do to try to get that message out we certainly want to participate in," she said.

Although the conference has been firmed up for June 25-26, 2005, there's much to be done before then, said Gene Covington, whose husband Champ is a survivor of throat cancer. She's part of a steering committee that is raising $120,000 for the conference, which will be offered free except to health professionals earning continuing education credits.

"We're more than half-way there," she said.

The conference, which is open to anyone who has been diagnosed with cancer and their families as well as health care professionals and therapists, also will require about 70 volunteers, she said.

Participants will learn how to use guided imagery, music, poetry, drama, creative arts and other means to develop healthy attitudes toward life with the disease, Adrian said.

"It used to be that cancer felt like a death sentence," she said. "And now it can often be a life sentence."

Attitudes of the medical community about such healing methods are changing as more people have become survivors of cancer, said Adrian, who was director of a holistic health center when she was diagnosed. It wasn't that way when she told her doctor in 1989 that she wanted to be healed in spirit as well as body.

"The oncologist raised his voice, yelled at me and said, 'emotions have nothing to do with it!' And I knew from my background that that wasn't true," she said.

She was concerned about others of the nation's 10 million cancer survivors who may have been getting the same kind of treatment, so she brought together experts in the field and organized her first conference, which has grown into a program called "Cancer as a Turning Point, From Surviving to Thriving."

For this, her 19th conference, she has arranged two well-known authors among the speakers: Dr. Rachel Remen, author ofThe New York Times best-seller "Kitchen Table Wisdom" and Dr. Lawrence LeShan, a psychologist and author of Cancer as a Turning Point.

"For so many of us that have dealt with cancer, life is actually better afterwards than it was before," Adrian said.

Although the conference is free, pre-registration is required. Registration will be available on-line on the Healing Journeys Web site as the date approaches, and brochures will be circulated about three months before the program.