Integrator Blog News & Reports

Integration, by nature, asks us to open our peripheral visions. We are served to look at the whole of the field. We need to develop new fascia, new connectivity. Opportunities crop up in new places. The Integrator Blog News and Reports is meant to provide you with information, insights and tools to enhance integrated care in the environment you serve. - John Weeks, publisher-editor

NCCAM to Examine "the Effectiveness and Cost-Effectiveness of CAM as Practiced in Community Settings."
Time for congratulations. On September 5, 2007, the National Advisory Council to the NIH National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) affirmed a concept paper for a new program. Finally, NCCAM will support "those studies examining the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of CAM as practiced in community settings." Here is the concept paper, some commentary - appropriated from Dr. Seuss - and the link. There is much to be pleased about here.
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Are Your Services Good for Employee Health and Productivity? IHPM's Employer-Focused Conference Includes Integrative Medicine and Complementary Healthcare Track
Integrative medicine leaders have identified employers as the healthcare stakeholder, next to consumers, with the strongest alignment of economic interest with the advance of complementary and integrated health care. All aspects of that potent connection can be explored at the October 17-19 meeting of the Institute for Health and Productivity Management (IHPM). IHPM will offer a multi-segment track on Integrative/Complementary Healthcare, co-chaired by Brent Bauer, MD, integrative medicine leader with Mayo Clinic. Mayo and the International Foundation for Employee Benefit Plans are co-sponsoring the meeting. Attendees with a stake in integrated care will have a chance to deeply explore the most progressive, global thinking about an employer's investment in healthcare. Integrator adviser Ken Pelletier, PhD, MD (hc) will keynote. Check it out!
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$90-Million Massage Enterprise, Massage Envy, Turns to Employee Benefits Market
The struggle to create successful business models in complementary healthcare appears to have been licked by Scottsdale, Arizona-based Massage Envy. The 5-year-old firm, which offers convenient and inexpensive massages, anticipates generating $90-million in 2007 at its 265 franchises. Some 15-20 more franchises are opening each month. Recently the firm began marketing their memberships as an employee benefit to the 2500 corporate members of Wellness Councils of America. The model has some parallels in cost, convenience and access with the Community Acupuncture Network business model. Is Massage Envy an example of the emergence of a "thriving industry of health creation?"
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Interview: Holistic Leader Kjersten Gmeiner, MD on the Fit of "Group Visits" with Holism
Kjersten Gmeiner, MD is a "group visit" leader with Group Health Cooperative. Gmeiner, a board member of the American Holistic Medicine Association, and believes that this "innovative practice model" - which is being implemented at systems like Cleveland Clinic and Kaiser Permanente - is a particularly good fit for holistic practitioners: "If you have an educational or patient empowerment focus, group visits are it." In this Integrator interview, Gmeiner describes her incorporation of group visits in her practice, touches on the national movement and speaks of the particular fit with whole person, integrative and holistic healthcare.
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Why Build a "CAM Ghetto"?
Colleagues have twice recently shared their views with me that for their complementary healthcare discipline to seek coalition with other complementary healthcare fields is little more than forming a "CAM ghetto." Better to spend a discipline's precious political capital angling for an advantage for that discipline in the mainstream system. To clarify my thinking, I contacted author-speaker Paul Loeb, an expert on citizen action, empowerment and social change, for his perspective. What do you think?
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Resources
Integrator Archive by Subject for January-June 2007: All Hot-linked

Integrator Archive by Subject for 2006: All Hot-linked

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