John Weeks

October 10, 2019

How the Spirit of Greta Thunberg Was Repeatedly Invoked at a Colloquium on the Microbiome

The headliner for the September 27, 2019  Dr. Rogers Prize Colloquium was Alessio Fasano, MD the Harvard professor and celiac disease researcher making the global rounds as a microbiome expert. Fasano broke ranks with conventional practice when he began to assert the link between dysbiotic and disordered gut bacteria and the shocking rise of autism. He shared the stage at the Vancouver, BC event with two Canadians: fecal transplant researcher Jeremy Burton, BSc, MSc, PhD, and this year’s $250,000 Dr. Rogers Prize winner, the pioneering micro nutrient and mental health researcher Bonnie Kaplan, PhD. Perhaps because of the content, when it came to audience questions the spirit pervading the room was that of the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. That very day outside the meeting place, Thunberg’s activism provoked a student-led march. The micro and macro met in parallel calls for disruptive change. “So the question is,” Kaplan asked, “where is our Greta Thunberg?”
September 18, 2019

HEALM: The David Katz’ and Lifestyle Medicine Strategy to Get Randomized Controlled Trials to Share Research’s Iron Throne

About the first thing one is taught in medical research is that there are hierarchies of evidence and that the “RCT” (randomized controlled trial) sits on the Iron Throne. What the integrative user of multimodal, individually-tailored approaches immediately feels is estrangement and resentment at rules that seem form-fit for pharma. Can integrative even get an audience in such a court? Now the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) and the True Health Initiative led by Yale public health, integrative, and lifestyle medicine leader David Katz, MD, MPH have published a model that seeks to take the RCT’s down a notch. It’s a diversity play. They recommend a “systematically weighted approach” involving multiple research models that “(increase) the weight and thereby validity of evidence specially applied to lifestyle interventions.” I reached Katz for an interview in which he spoke to the model’s relationships to integrative whole system research models and of the “tyranny of the RCT”. He shares intriguing political, strategic and tactical dimensions to lifestyle medicine’s Hierarchies of Evidence Applied to Lifestyle Medicine (HEALM).
September 4, 2019

Self-Interested Whims of the Oligarchs: Google and Facebook Kill Access to Alternative and Integrative Medicine

The blog post to which my attention was called was entitled When Big Brother Went High Tech. The news from energy medicine author Lynn McTaggert jerked attention of the integrative community to a story I’d long anticipated: Google’s censors turned their attention to the still wild political-economical-medical frontier of “alternative medicine”. Osteopath and internet businessman Joseph Mercola reported that 99% of the traffic to his sometimes pugnacious mercola.com “natural health” website was killed. “Integrative medicine” was not spared. Visits to the much more tame Dr. Weil site from that field’s godfather dropped 66%. In an August 2019 e-blast to his list of Minnesota holistic practitioners on Google’s incendiary actions, an integrative leader of 40-years Bill Manahan, MD writes: “”I think you will find it pretty scary for those of us in the integrative, alternative, and functional medicine fields.”
September 3, 2019

Integrative Psychiatrist James Gordon on Woodstock, Ayahuasca, Colonialism and His Work in the World’s Traumatic Hotspots

Two decades ago, James Gordon, MD was the chair of the top US government effort to examine integrative medicine policy. In an August 20, 2019 blogpost, the integrative psychiatrist shared how 50 years ago he traveled with crisis intervention nurse Sharon Curtin and singer Joan Baez to Woodstock where he treated hundreds of hallucinating attendees through a co-caring model. His August 9, 2019 letter to the New York Times challenged the Trumpian portrayal of mass-shootings motivated only by mental illness. Gordon described himself this way: “Though my professional work is devoted largely to trauma healing for survivors of such mass murders — and of wars, state-sponsored torture and climate-related disasters — I have known and treated a number of violent extremists, including mass murderers.” Trauma is us. On September 10, 2019, trauma hot-spots healer Gordon has a new book coming out on the transformation needed. I reached him for a brief interview.