Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine

How about a research department at an acupuncture and Oriental medicine school? Let’s partner with mainstream academic institutions and go after NIH grants!  Wouldn’t it be terrific to have an organization that could give voice to all the licensed complementary and integrative health professions in dialogues they could not enter alone? Might this be a vehicle to foster interprofessional and inter-institutional relationships between these fields and their better-resourced peers? Might they give voice to the integrative health values and disciplines in multiple dialogues at the National Academy of Medicine and elsewhere to shape US medicine and health? And isn’t it incumbent on us to ensure that social justice is woven into the healthcare dialogue at every possibility? In October 2019, the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine chose to honor with their “Change Maker” award an individual who for a quarter century has been a leader in the charge to open such terrain: Elizabeth A. “Liza” Goldblatt, PhD, MPA/HA. I reached out to a set of her colleagues for comments on Goldblatt’s multiple contributions.