- John Weeks, Writer, Speaker, Change Agent. Click below to subscribe to the Integrator
- johnweeks@theintegratorblog.com
John Weeks
January 19, 2020
The beginning of the RAND project proposal captures dimensions of an awful tend: “The future of research in the Complementary and Integrative Health (CIH) institutions is in jeopardy. A number of CIH colleges and universities are losing their research departments due to lack of consistent funding and the understandable inability to subsidize them with tuition costs. The CIH Colleges are in danger of becoming technical teaching institutions and not institutions of learning. Those teaching the students will not be scholars and researchers who are producing new knowledge for their profession. NIH offers several training grants for researchers and these have been very effective in training CIH practitioners to be researchers. Unfortunately, these CIH practitioners generally leave their institutions for research training and degrees, and without robust research centers at the CIH institutions, they are rarely able to go back.” In December 2019, RAND received a $1-million gift to kick-start a strategy – led by Patricia Herman, ND, PhD and Ian Coulter, PhD – to overcome these structural flaws. Here is a look at the project.
January 11, 2020
In July 2019 I published a piece entitled Harvard Medical School Grand Rounds Powerfully Interlocks Integrative Medicine and Climate Agendas. It was based on an event led by Peter Wayne, PhD. Now Wayne and two colleagues with the Osher Collaborative for Integrative Medicine have published a related commentary that makes a direct claim in its title: Integrative Medicine Is a Good Prescription for Patients and Planet (in open access throughout January). The authors initiate an intriguing and expansive case for myriad ways that this assertion may be so. For instance: how might an increase in mindfulness diminish shopping addiction, and thus resource consumption? This column is a call for your perspectives of up to 250 words on angles and arguments that support – or oppose – that bold claim. I will select from and publish responses along with photos and brief bio data of contributors in a future Integrator piece. The findings are meant to deepen an evidence-informed dialogue on this topic. Might the integrative health-climate change connection re-frame much more broadly the transformative meaning of this movement?
December 21, 2019
The Integrator Blog News & Reports annually marks the winter solstice with a Top 10 for Policy and Action in Integrative Health and Medicine. In the selection of the Top 10, “the accent is on the affirmative” as the jazzman sings. Thus the Coming of the Light from individuals and organizations in the field making positive contributions to shift the medical industry toward a system that focuses on creating health. Less positive things sometimes make the list. Integrator articles are now published at johnweeks-integrator.com/posts with content going back to 2006 at the original Integrator site, Prior Top 10 lists, a sort of Cliff Notes of the movement’s history, are linked at the bottom of this column. Below are the Top 10 for 2019. Happy Solstice!
December 16, 2019
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?