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Barrie Cassileth, Medical Sociology

Barrie Joyce Rabinowitz Cassileth, GR’78, a former associate professor of medical sociology in Penn’s School of Medicine and a pioneer of cancer care, passed away on February 26 from complications of Alzheimer’s Disease. She was 83.

Born in Philadelphia, Dr. Cassileth studied social sciences at Bennington College, graduating in 1959. After taking a hiatus when her husband was called up for military service, she obtained a master’s degree in psychology from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. She ultimately earned a PhD in medical sociology from Penn’s School of Medicine in 1978. After graduating, she taught at the School of Medicine. Initially a research assistant professor of medicine, she was promoted in 1983 to assistant professor and a year later to associate professor. While at Penn, she also served as director of Penn’s Hospice Program and director of the psychosocial program at Penn’s Cancer Center. In 1979, she edited her first book, The Cancer Patient: Social and Medical Aspects of Care, which presented several essays on the human and social aspects of cancer. 

She left Penn to teach at Duke University, then at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. In 1999, Laurance Rockefeller, a benefactor of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, approached Dr. Cassileth to assist with the founding of an integrative care program. She launched the integrative medicine service at Memorial Sloan Kettering, which began as a one-person office and evolved over the years into its own building. With this center and with the Society for Integrative Oncology, of which she was the founding president in 2003, she consolidated her efforts to bring treatments like acupuncture and massage into mainstream cancer care in a supplemental role to scientifically proven and rigorously tested therapies like chemotherapy and radiation. She was outspoken against the “quackery” of alternative medicine, and emphasized that natural methods like acupuncture, massage, and herbs should not be used as a substitute to conventional medicine.

Dr. Cassileth was eminent in the medical fields and advanced her strong opinions via a series of publications. In 1985, she and several colleagues published a pivotal study that showed that grit and determination do not play a role in cancer patients’ survival. She wrote The Alternative Medicine Handbook (1998) and The Complete Guide to Complementary Therapies in Cancer Care (2011), both of which offered methods for proper use of complementary medicine in a supplementary role to conventional medicine She made many media appearances dissuading doctors from advising their patients to seek alternative medicine, and famously opined that Steve Jobs “essentially committed suicide” by not seeking conventional treatment for a common and curable form of pancreatic cancer. 

“She was a legend in our field,” Ting Bao, the director of integrative breast oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering and the current president of the Society for Integrative Oncology, told The New York Times. Dr. Cassileth worked at Memorial Sloan Kettering until retiring in 2016. 

She is survived by her siblings, Stephen and Ruth Rabinowitz; her daughters, Jodi Cassileth Greenspan and Wendy Cassileth; her son, Gregory Cassileth; and six grandchildren.

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