Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, a pioneer of complementary and alternative medicine who co-founded a cancer help program at Commonweal in Bolinas, died on Aug. 8 at her home in Concord. She was 88 years old.
For decades, Dr. Remen guided patients and young doctors through a more humanistic approach to medical care. She designed The Healer’s Art curriculum of compassionate care for medical students, now taught at more than 90 universities, and she directed Commonweal’s landmark Cancer Help Program, an intensive week-long residential retreat for patients.
“Rachel had a capacity to remind people of their essential dignity,” said Michael Lerner, a co-founder of Commonweal. “She believed that the purpose of life is to grow in wisdom and learn to love better.”
From her longtime A-frame on the edge of Mount Tamalpais, D. Remen commuted to the Bolinas center, which hosts over 40 programs focused on health, healing, the arts, and environmental justice.
“She brought a master storyteller’s gift and a physician’s rigor to the deepest questions of what it means to be human,” said Oren Slozberg, the organization’s executive director.
Born in New York City in 1938, young Rachel saw medicine as “a front row seat on life,” she recalled in a 2008 lecture. Her father was a pharmacist, and her mother held a key position in the city’s Department of Public Health, a rare role for women of that era.
“I was the only pre-med in my kindergarten class,” she said. “It never occurred to me to lead another sort of life.”
At age 15, Rachel was diagnosed with severe Crohn’s disease. She endured multiple surgeries, losing part of her small intestine by age 29. Wearing a plastic device called an ileostomy, she felt hopelessly different. But a hands-on visit by a caregiver—wearing not plastic gloves, but a silk dress, heels, and stockings—restored her sense of elegance and femininity. The experience taught her that “serving requires us to know that our humanity is more powerful than our expertise,” she wrote.
Rachel began her career in traditional medicine, graduating from Cornell University’s prestigious Weill Medical College. Specializing in pediatric endocrinology, she was named associate director of Stanford Medical School’s Pediatrics Clinic. She aspired to become the school’s first female department chair, but she grew disillusioned with the mechanical, disease-focused model of conventional medicine, “feeling like a marshmallow who had been crushed on all four sides until she was as flat as a business card,” according to her friend Lissa Rankin.
Her lifelong struggle with Crohn’s disease shaped her perspective. Dr. Remen believed that illness is not an obstacle, but a doorway to a meaningful life, and she taught that healing is something larger than curing. It’s not a fix, she said, but an opportunity to return to spiritual “wholeness,” even at the edge of life.
After a visit to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, where she met Joseph Campbell, Abraham Maslow, and other adherents of the Human Potential Movement, Dr. Remen left Stanford. Her practice shifted to a Sausalito houseboat owned by Alan Watts, where she cared for end-stage cancer patients.
In 1983, she met Mr. Lerner at a luncheon in San Francisco’s Castro District. He had dreams of a psychosocial support program for people facing cancer, but things were bleak at Commonweal, and funding had collapsed. The board of directors opposed his idea.
“The two of us began to talk,” he recalled. The lunch crowd dissipated and “three hours later, it was just the two of us. At the table, we sat there and designed the Cancer Help Program. We persevered, and it’s been the spine of Commonweal’s work for the last 40 years.”
In the program’s retreats, people with cancer discover their ability to heal both themselves and each other through touch, poetry, art, meditation, and discussion. The approach has since been embedded in many conventional treatment programs, but at its inception, it was revolutionary. Dr. Remen remained active in the program until her death.
Dr. Remen also wrote two best-selling books, “Kitchen Table Wisdom” and “My Grandfather’s Blessings,” a reference to her Orthodox rabbi grandfather. The collections of stories are centered on the value of shared experience.
But she believed her greatest legacy is her Healer’s Art curriculum, which is administered by the Remen Institute for the Study of Health & Illness. Founded at Commonweal in 1991 and now managed by Ohio’s Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine, the course is offered annually at more than 90 medical schools across the country. Its goal is to help young doctors find deeper satisfaction and meaning in their day-to-day work lives, reminding them to experience medicine not only as a work of science but also as an act of love.
“When Saint Peter asks me what I have contributed to others with my life that might make me eligible for a place in Heaven,” she wrote, “It would be The Healer’s Art.”
Dr. Remen was fiercely independent, fussy, and sometimes bossy, friends said. She started every meeting in spiritual reverence, with silence and a poem. But she also loved reading The New Yorker, thrift shopping, See’s lollipops and a Starbucks quad espresso over ice. This week, former students are flooding social media to share memories and stories.
“I am at a loss of words to express my profound gratitude for the gift of having had her in my life for twenty years,” Dr. Rankin wrote.
“Rachel will always be the most wise and loving person I have ever known,” Dr. Barton Sparagon, a preventative medicine physician in Arcata, wrote.
Texas oncologist Dr. Noushin Izadifar Hart still practices Dr. Remen’s gracious etiquette: Wash your hands before touching a patient, not after.
Among her students was former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy. “Rachel was a force of love and hope,” he said in a statement. “I would call her when I was happy, when I was lost, and when I just wanted to say hi. Every conversation with her felt like coming home.”
Even as Dr. Remen grew frail and moved to the East Bay because she could no longer navigate the steep stairs of her Mill Valley home, she celebrated life. “This season has become profoundly beautiful and meaningful to me,” she wrote. “Autumn. The time of the harvest. When seeds planted years ago have grown to maturity and surprisingly revealed their true beauty and significance.”
She died peacefully at home under hospice care, accompanied by her beloved Maine Coon named Oskar and loved ones singing at her side.
To honor Dr. Remen’s work, Commonweal created a self-paced course with archives of her interviews and conversations. “Rachel taught all of us that even in illness, even in dying, there is room for wholeness,” Mr. Slozberg said. “Her work and her wisdom continue through the countless people she touched.”
A public celebration of life for Rachel Naomi Remen will take place from 2 to 4 p.m. on Oct. 3 at Commonweal (451 Mesa Road, Bolinas).