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

Bravo to Marja Verhoef, PhD and her team with the Canadian Interdisciplinary Network for Complementary and Alternative Medicine Research (IN-CAM)! On March 31, 2008, IN-CAM unveiled the IN-CAM Outcomes Database. The project, funded through the Lotte & John Hecht Memorial Foundation, brings together a huge set of instruments with which practitioners and researchers can explore their outcomes. While one might quibble with the non-inclusion of presenteeism and economic indicators, this database should become the center of the universe for the most productive research in complementary and integrative medicine. Ever wonder why it is leaders from Canada and not the United States who have taken the lead in this work?
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Academic Advances: AMSA & NMSA, SPARC, UCLA, Harvard, NUHS, NIH-Yoga, Yale, NYCC, New Consortium Members, plus

Breakthrough: American Medical Student Association formally recognizes the Naturopathic Medical Student Association as an affiliate ... Fønnebø to propose "peace treaty" in "research battleground" at May 18 SPARC meeting ... Harvard integrative clinic featured ... UCLA program offers seven approaches to back pain in consumer-focused event ... Formerly chiropractic-only schools gain recognition for AOM and ND programs ... Yale's kick-off event draws overflow crowd ... NIH to have May Yoga week ... U Mass natural products Master's degree now largely internet-based ... BU and Northwestern Feinberg bring to 41 the members of the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine ... Master's in Integrative Health in development for 2008 at National University, San Diego.
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Columnist Michael Levin: Opportunities for Integrative Medicine in a Recent AARP Report on Drug Price Escalation

Integrator columnist Michael Levin, founder of Health Business Strategies, is a long-time promoter of integrative medicine strategies that challenge the often costly, unsafe and quality of life damaging interventions promoted by Big Pharma. So when Levin, who has been an executive with both Pharma and dietary supplement firms, saw the new AARP report on drug price trends pre and post the implementation of the Medicare Drug Benefit, he analyzed it both for what Pharma had already extracted, and for what integrative medicine might. Here is Levin's brief report and view of opportunities.
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After Obama's Talk on Race - Reflections on Parallels in Healthcare Integration

[From my Integrative Practitioner Online column] "I have always viewed work in healthcare “integration” as deeply akin to the effort to racially integrate the culture we inhabit. So I was riveted when Barack Obama addressed the nation with a speech which was, as the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart put it, the first time “a prominent politician spoke to Americans about race, as though they were adults.” I listened as a child of parents who took me on Open Housing marches in Seattle 45 years ago. I also listened from within my 25 years of involvement with thousands of you in the plodding advancement of the “integration” of health care disciplines and practices. The parallels are profound. Between the dominant school of medicine and any healing-oriented, whole person approach, there exists a huge cultural and economic chasm."
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Chiropractors in the Nation's Largest Health System: Anthony Lisi, DC on Integration into Veterans Health Facilities

When Yale University School of Medicine recently chose to bring a chiropractor into their first Integrative Medicine Symposium, Anthony Lisi, DC was the chosen presenter. As director of the Veterans Health Administration's Chiropractic Service, Lisi sits in the hot-seat for the most significant complementary and alternative healthcare integration effort nationwide. To Lisi's account, practitioner-to-practitioner relationships and patient reports are overcoming the deep reluctance with which most of the VA's medical directors greeted this Congressionally-mandated program. The Integrator caught up with Lisi to learn more about this pioneering initiative.
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Resources

Integrator Archive by Subject for January-June 2007
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Integrator Archive by Subject for 2006: All Hot-linked
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