non-pharmacologic

June 26, 2020

COVID-19’s Coming Mental Health Pandemic? Interview on Expansive Strategies with Integrative Psychiatrist James Lake, MD

In a recent conference organized out of Prague and moved online, a presenter from the United Kingdom shared a list of concerns that seemed to go on forever of all that is frightening people these days. Foremost on his list were Covid19, what seem to many like authoritarian governmental measures to control its spread, uncertainty about the economy, and the questionable competence of world leaders in the face of a mounting global crisis. In the United States, these are compounded by unrest over police brutality against Black people forcing many to re-examine the legacy of 400 years of what historians call our “peculiar institution” of slavery. Author and clinician James Lake MD is an integrative psychiatrist who has witnessed the effects of this “perfect storm” close up. For Psychiatry Times, Lake authored a column on what he calls A Mental Health Pandemic: The Second Wave of COVID-19. He urged a re-think of typical mental health responses to include integrative solutions in his “Call for a National Strategy.” I reached Lake to explore what has steered his vision to make such dire predictions, and to explore how integrative methods might best figure into solutions.
January 26, 2020

Reflections from Rick Hecht, MD on Academic Consortium Meeting with ACCME President Graham McMahon, MD, MMSc

Prior to publication of my article on the proposed new standards on “content validity” from the Accreditation Commission for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), I circulated it to a few leaders in the field for comments. In the process, I learned that a team from the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health (“the Consortium”) recently had a conference call with Graham McMahon, MD, MMSc, ACCME president and chief executive officer. Saturday morning, January 25, 2020 I spoke with Rick Hecht, MD, the Consortium chair, who was part of the conference cal. He has had other recent discussions with key colleagues in the CME office of his home institution. Hecht’s comments offer some perspective on ACCME’s current areas of focus in CME. I have assembled his comments in the following interview format and secured his approval prior to publication.
December 16, 2019

Can the New American Nutrition Association Finally De-Rodney Dangerfield Nutrition in US Medicine?

What reform push to turn the medical industry toward health has been shouted from the white-papered roof tops as long as the call to dramatically increase the role of nutrition in professional education and practice? Food as medicine is both cornerstone and connective stratum across the naturopathic, functional, integrative, lifestyle, and most traditional medicine models for reform. The bugle was sounded again recently. With a reminder that poor nutrition is a leading factor in chronic disease and an assertion that “personalized nutrition has the power to reverse this epidemic,” five nutrition-related organizations announced they have banded together to form the American Nutrition Association (ANA). Their bodacious goal: nothing less than to help “unleash nutrition’s potential to reverse the crisis.” Who are these folks and what might they do to finally give nutrition the respect it deserves?
November 24, 2019

Elizabeth “Liza” Goldblatt, PhD, MPA/HA Honored with AIHM’s Change-Maker Award: 8 Leaders Offer Gratitude

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.