health reform

April 9, 2020

Restraining Trade? Evidence Says ACCME Is in Fact Targeting Integrative Medicine Continuing Medical Education

The easy access by medical doctors to accredited continuing medical education in integrative medicine is an engine of the field’s growth. So as stories emerged of what was believed to be an Accreditation Council on Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) clamp down, I engaged a series of interviews and reports. I reported direct and indirect assurances from ACCME’s CEO Graham McMahon, MD, MMSc that integrative medicine is not being targeted. Yet a recent commentary from leaders of the Osher Collaborative for Integrative Medicine raised the question again. I decided to review evidence to this date. I cannot but conclude that integrative medicine is, in fact, at the center of the bullseye in ACCME’s recent push for new standards of “content validity” regarding “controversial areas”. Here is the evidence.
March 18, 2020

Yes, Friends, the Medical Industry Can Be Transformed: The VA’s Whole Health System of Care at 2 Years

That there should be a huge transformational drama underway in the US medical industry is a desire and dream that powers the integrative health movement and the work of many others. Those who might enjoy a sort of reality TV examination of not the fantasy but the multi-dimensional actuality of what such change looks like have a treat coming. The scene of action is 18 huge medical centers distributed across the entire United States. The script writers are 25 scientists on an evaluation team. The drama cuts across 4 deeply inter-related story lines: the impact of the transformational change on patients, on employees, on utilization, and on the extent of implementation and cost. We the people literally own this story. The investment and outcomes – from which any delivery organization can learn – are revealed in plain English in the public domain. If the launch of the transformational journey was Episode 1 of the series, then this 39-page report after two years is Episode 2. It’s deep insight into a dream coming true in the Whole Health System of Care at the US Veterans Administration (VA). It’s long awaited. And it is exciting.
March 6, 2020

“Holistic Primary Care” at 20 Years: A Chat with Medical Reporter and Editor Erik Goldman

In the mid-1980s, editor of Holistic Primary Care Erik Goldman began a career as a medical reporter. It was a boom-time for pharma-sponsored print publications. Each month mounds of media arrived at each medical doctor’s doorstep. Goldman’s first reporter job was with Dermatology News. It was what he calls “the height of unfettered spending” by big pharma. Goldman”s personal interests in natural medicine made him feel “an imposter – like they’d find out about me somehow.” By the early 1990s he was encouraging his editors to dip into the emerging “CAM” world.  He unsuccessfully shopped the idea of focused holistic medicine publication to publishers before realizing that the “someone” just might be him. In 2000, he teamed up with with publisher Meg Sinclair and co-founded Holistic Primary Care which now goes out to 60,000 mainly conventional practitioners. I caught up with this fellow who is the integrative field’s most legit and enduring medical reporter – and presently sponsor of the Practitioner Channel Forum – to reflect on the two decades and look forward.
February 13, 2020

James Maskell’s “The Community Cure” – A Terrific Contribution re Loneliness, Group Services, and Fundamental Transformation

Health creation. Transformation. From reactivity to well-being. Empowerment. From system-centered to person-centered. Using the least force. Changing the therapeutic order of the nation. These aspirations warm and power the integrative health movement, dreams on the long march for radical re-direction of a $3.5-trillion industry. Yet how often do change prescriptions meet the radical requirements of the dreams? Acupuncture in Medicare doesn’t do it. Nor non-pharma into chronic pain guidelines. In The Community Cure: Transforming Health Outcomes Together, Evolution of Medicine impresario James Maskell offers a re-framework that seeks to rise to the task. Maskell grounds his “cure” in group services models through which the medium is the message for a population crippled by loneliness.