academic medicine

December 21, 2019

Coming of the Light: The 2019 Integrator Top 10 for Policy and Action in Integrative Health and Medicine

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

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.
October 27, 2019

Chiropractor Goertz: Chairperson at PCORI & Duke Spine Care Leader – Interview and Data on PCORI Integrative Grants

Long-timers in the integrative trenches will know the paradoxical feelings of dismay at how messed up health care still is and at the same time satisfaction at just how far “integration” has advanced. Evidence for the latter comes from not one but two recent moves in the career of chiropractor and health services researcher Christine Goertz, DC, PhD. Place yourself in 1988. The chiropractors were just concluding their decade-long, successful Wilk vs. the AMA anti-trust suit. Most of medicine and much of the media – in part because of the AMA’s economically-driven attacks – equated “chiropractor” with “quack”.  Now consider where Goertz has arrived via her health services research and policy career that focused on safety, effectiveness and quality issues. She was recently named by the General Accounting Office as Chairperson, Board of Governors, for the Congressionally-funded, quasi-public Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). And Goertz just began a new role as Professor and the Director of System Development and Coordination for Spine Health at Duke Health in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. I reached Goertz to talk with her about her dual ascension.