American Chiropractic Association

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.
December 16, 2018

Is a New Trump Report Backing Obamacare’s Integrative Friendly “Non-Discrimination in Health Care”?

An alert went out two weeks ago to a set of policy-oriented integrative health and medicine types. The Trump administration had published a report – “Reforming America’s Healthcare System Through Choice and Competition.” The email suggested that there was support here for the non-discrimination in healthcare provision of the Affordable Healthcare Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”). Was this actually a dovetailing support of the Trump administration with the healthcare policy of his predecessor? I took a look and then connected a lobbyist who was on the ground when the Obama administration’s Section 2706: Non-Discrimination in Health Care was being drafted. The findings on the Trump study were mixed.