- John Weeks, Writer, Speaker, Change Agent. Click below to subscribe to the Integrator
- johnweeks@theintegratorblog.com
health policy
November 8, 2019
The decision of the Cleveland Clinic to start a Center for Functional Medicine was big news. That the $9-billion system gave the initiative significant visibility suggested arrival for functional medicine. A few hurdles still existed. Cleveland Clinic’s new partners needed to clarify and create a clinical model that could be measured. That was the caveat. This Center was a bet – a pilot based on a largely untested belief that functional medicine could outperform regular medicine, and at lower cost. Most in the field assumed this would prove a slam dunk. Care from a team of functional medicine physician/nutritionist/health coach and then behavioral specialist became the unit for which outcomes would be measured. Now in a publication in JAMA Network, the first results are in. The headlines were positive – but what do the data really say?
October 13, 2019
The Integrator article two issues ago on Google’s activities that precipitously gouged traffic at key websites (Self-Interested Whims of the Oligarchs: Google and Facebook Kill Access to Alternative and Integrative Medicine) immediately drew a range of responses. Longtime medical journalist Erik Goldman shared the remarkable diminution of traffic at his Holistic Primary Care site. Some spoke of organizing efforts. At the same time, other good analyses have been published. New information regarding Google’s growing partnerships with members of the medical industry and particularly pharmaceutical giants has come out. And there is an interesting coincidence of Google’s choice of dance partners as it matures and measures it global strategy and the corporate decision to excise its cheeky formative promise to “Don’t Be Evil”. Is it time to wonder whether there is a next level war for access emerging?
September 18, 2019
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).
July 26, 2019
Cast a net for papers on “innovations in group-delivered services” and what do you get? Guest editor Maria Chao, DrPh, MPA summed up the nearly 40 submissions this way: “Our editorial team was struck by the heterogeneity of integrative group visits for a range of health conditions, serving diverse patients across the life course and implemented in varied healthcare settings. A unifying theme is the potential for integrative group visits to address unmet needs of underserved and vulnerable patients. In many ways, group visits serve as a critical model towards integrative health equity.” The commentaries and research articles in the JACM Special Focus Issue on Innovation in Group Delivered Services make a potent case for an expanded role for groups not just for those who can pay cash but for all populations in a transformed healthcare system. All the articles are in open access until August 25, 2019.