Innovative Diagnostic and Treatment Options: An Interview with James R. Cowan, Jr., M.D., M.S., and Maryanne Cowan, L.C.S.W., Th.D.

Abstract

It is not often that a successful psychiatrist and a social worker team up to use innovative diagnostics and treatments to help their patients, but James R. Cowan, M.D., M.S., and Maryanne Cowan, L.C.S.W., Th.D., are doing just that. What began 25 years ago as a professional association at East Orange General Hospital, (East Orange, New Jersey) has evolved into a marriage, a joint clinical practice, and an ongoing exploration of new technologies and therapies that blend allopathic and meridian-based protocols. Today, this team’s work is unique, successful, and quite unlike any other practice in the United States. Dr. James Cowan, a fourth-generation physician, has been a practicing psychiatrist in Northern New Jersey for 32 years. After graduating from Meharry Medical College (Nashville, Tennessee) in 1970, he completed his psychiatric training at Harlem Hospital and Columbia University Medical School (both in New York City). He also obtained a Master’s degree in community psychiatry from Columbia Medical School. As director of psychiatry at East Orange General Hospital for 27 years, he has built a comprehensive psychiatric program there. Dr. Maryanne Cowan received an L.C.S.W. degree from Rutgers (New Brunswick, New Jersey), and is a licensed clinical social worker. After receiving her degree, she was a social worker at East Orange General Hospital, and worked there for 3 years, and then established her own practice. This past March, she received a Doctor of Theology (Th.D. degree) in integrative health care and spiritual healing from the Holos Graduate Seminary in Fair Grove, Missouri. Dr. Maryanne Cowan has long been interested in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), as well as in therapies that are nontoxic and noninvasive, and that have fewer side effects than allopathic treatments. It was she who sparked her husband’s interest in CAM protocols, and the team began to attend seminars on new diagnostic and treatment options to better serve their patients. This led to their creation of Advanced Dimensions in Healing, a complementary medicine and wellness center in Ridgewood, New Jersey. A variety of allopathic and CAM services are offered at the center, with such recent protocols as Gas Discharge Visualization (GDV) for real-time energy-field analysis; Bioresonance to provide healing at a cellular level; and SottoPelle,™ a form of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy.