integrative medicine

November 18, 2019

Changes at the VA: Gaudet Exits, Kligler in New Role, Integrative Whole Health in 37 new Locations

Word began to break mid-summer of two developments at the Veteran’s Administration related to the giant agency’s integrative whole health effort. One was that Tracy Gaudet, MD, the charismatic founding director of the VA’s Office of Patient-Centered Care and Cultural Transformation that birthed the initiative was moving on. The immediate response of many is concern. Yet the news came concurrently with word that the VA’s initiative is expanding from the initial 18 to 37 new sites. Even with leadership change at the top of the VA, the initiative is secure and strongly supported. I connected with Ben Kligler, MD, MPH, Gaudet’s colleague who is presently acting director for an update.
November 16, 2019

Understanding Google’s Censorship of Integrative Content: The Holistic Primary Care Case

Most involved in integrative and functional medicine have by now heard of how traffic on scores of integrative health and natural products websites dropped 50%-95% via the cutting stroke of changes quietly made by Google leaders.  I summarized and commented on the reporting of others in Self-Interested Whims of the Oligarchs: Google and Facebook Kill Access to Alternative and Integrative Medicine. The bias in the title was my judgement based. More questions than answers remain. I chose to explore further via a colleague of 30 years, medical writer, Erik Goldman. The traffic at his relatively conservative website, Holistic Primary Care (HPC),  the hard-copy broadsheet for which he serves as founding editor, was one of those whacked. Goldman, who will host a panel on the Google issues at HPC‘s “Practitioner Channel Forum” (April 23-24 at the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport) offers a look under the covers at Google’s actions that seem to have motivations somewhere between unintended consequences and an external pernicious influences of the first order.
November 8, 2019

Cleveland Clinic’s Functional Medicine Outcomes in JAMA: Six Perspectives

The decision of the Cleveland Clinic to start a Center for Functional Medicine was big news. That the $9-billion system gave the initiative significant visibility suggested arrival for functional medicine. A few hurdles still existed. Cleveland Clinic’s new partners needed to clarify and create a clinical model that could be measured. That was the caveat. This Center was a bet – a pilot based on a largely untested belief that functional medicine could outperform regular medicine, and at lower cost. Most in the field assumed this would prove a slam dunk. Care from a team of functional medicine physician/nutritionist/health coach and then behavioral specialist became the unit for which outcomes would be measured. Now in a publication in JAMA Network, the first results are in. The headlines were positive – but what do the data really say?
September 3, 2019

Integrative Psychiatrist James Gordon on Woodstock, Ayahuasca, Colonialism and His Work in the World’s Traumatic Hotspots

Two decades ago, James Gordon, MD was the chair of the top US government effort to examine integrative medicine policy. In an August 20, 2019 blogpost, the integrative psychiatrist shared how 50 years ago he traveled with crisis intervention nurse Sharon Curtin and singer Joan Baez to Woodstock where he treated hundreds of hallucinating attendees through a co-caring model. His August 9, 2019 letter to the New York Times challenged the Trumpian portrayal of mass-shootings motivated only by mental illness. Gordon described himself this way: “Though my professional work is devoted largely to trauma healing for survivors of such mass murders — and of wars, state-sponsored torture and climate-related disasters — I have known and treated a number of violent extremists, including mass murderers.” Trauma is us. On September 10, 2019, trauma hot-spots healer Gordon has a new book coming out on the transformation needed. I reached him for a brief interview.