Photo

Dr. Mitchell Gaynor, with Tibetan singing bowls in a Manhattan office in 2005, advocated natural and traditional medicine. Credit Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times

Dr. Mitchell L. Gaynor, a Manhattan oncologist and popular author who taught cancer patients to supplement conventional medicine with soothing music, diet and meditation — and practiced what he prescribed — was found dead on Tuesday at his country home in Hillsdale, N.Y. He was 59.

The cause was suicide, said Kevin Skype, senior investigator for the Columbia County sheriff. Further details were not available.

Dr. Gaynor, the son of a West Texas dentist, built both a distinguished medical career and a public following. The founder and president of Gaynor Integrative Oncology in Manhattan, he had been a clinical assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, also in Manhattan, and director of medical oncology at the school’s Center for Integrative Medicine.

He was also the author of six books, many of them focused on the environment’s effect on an individual’s health and geared for a general readership. They include “The Healing Power of Sound” (1999), “Dr. Gaynor’s Cancer Prevention Program” (1999) and “Nurture Nature, Nurture Health” (2005).

In 2013, Jon Regen, a jazz and pop pianist and son of a patient of Dr. Gaynor’s, joined with him to produce a record titled “Change Your Mind.” After it was featured on “The Dr. Oz Show,” the record topped Billboard magazine’s New Age charts. They recorded two other albums, “Uplift” and “Peaceful Sleep.”

Dr. Gaynor, who received a traditional medical education and continued to recommend traditional cancer treatments, was a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University in Manhattan in 1987 when he became fascinated by integrative oncology, which encompasses both conventional and alternative treatments — a hybrid that its detractors call pseudoscience. At the time, research was being conducted at the university into nutrient-gene interactions and the immune system.

“I was amazed at the fact that we really ‘are what we eat,’ and that with the best medical training in the world, nobody had ever taught me this,” he said in a 2013 interview.

In 1991, Dr. Gaynor was at New York Hospital treating a refugee Tibetan monk named Odsal who was found to have a rare cardiac condition. He concluded that the monk, dislocated from his homeland, “was literally suffering from a broken heart.”

read on at ...