Michael Rocha, M.D., cardiologist at Hawthorne Medical Associates and Heart Failure Director at St. Luke's Hospital, offered a Southcoast Health Physician CME presentation entitled "Healing the Healers Through Mindfulness" on May 13, 2015. The program was designed to help medical professionals identify and define burnout and learn coping mechanisms to manage stress. The presentation began with the showing of "The Connection", a film about people recovering from illnesses like cancer, heart disease, infertility, chronic pain and MS who use mindfulness techniques like meditation and yoga to bring about healing. Dr. Rocha then described his own journey in which he found himself "looking to escape the treadmill of medicine" and went on to discover the power of mindfulness to heal himself and his patients. Using techniques that he learned from Jean Pierre Marques and through an on-line MBSR course through UMass Medical Center, Dr. Rocha led the group in some of those ways of relieving stress. Click here for a  70-minute video of Dr. Rocha's presentation, Click here for photos and video of a presentations that Dr. Rocha gave at a recent Southcoast Worksite Health and Wellness Collaborative conference. For more information, go to his web site at the New Bedford Wellness Initiative.

(Top row) The audience views the movie "The Connection" in the McBratney Amphitheater at St. Luke's Hospital. (Row two) Dr. Rocha begins his remarks with a description of how he realized what the stress of his medical practice was doing to him and his family. ((Row three) Dr. Rocha describes the characteristics of burnout and then goes on to talk about the importance of using humor to relieve stress while wearing the same red rubber nose that he and his staff sometime wear. (Rows four and five) Dr. Rocha then takes the audience through a number of yoga exercises designed to relieve the effects of stress on the body.