- John Weeks, Writer, Speaker, Change Agent. Click below to subscribe to the Integrator
- johnweeks@theintegratorblog.com
lifestyle medicine
December 12, 2020
The murder of George Floyd, and its clearly non-anomalous nature, tooth-picked open the eyes of many white people to the depths of racism, of systematic intrusion of bigotry, and built in barriers to the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for vast sets of people of color in the U.S. population. One place the need for re-education in places high and low was evident in the commitment to “deepening my understanding of systemic racism” from Bill Gates. He was explaining his choice for the book at the top of list of 2020 reading: The New Jim Crow. Multiple integrative health and medicine organizations responded to Floyd’s murder with their own statements of solidarity, and of commitment. I reported these just 10 days after Floyd’s death on June 7 (8 organizations) then a second set on June 28 (13 more). As my own commitment, I closed the latter with a promise to check in with these organizations 6 months later to see how they have acted on their commitments. Here is the report-back to the community.
July 12, 2020
Virtually every corner of the medical industry houses an entangling drama between mission and money. There is the service, the need to make a living, and then the way making a living can transform into a production orientation dominated by the impulse to make more money. For integrative health and medicine, the drama is intense, whether in integrative centers owned by large institutions or solo practices in the community. The mission-money challenges get “curiouser and curiouser” for the licensed integrative practice fields that are not fully swept up into the thundering $3.3 trillion river of cash that annually rips through the dominant medical industry. An edginess sets in when, as the sick joke has it, you have just enough recognition to get into debt, but not enough to get out of it yet. So it is always interesting to explore new data on income and practice methods such as were recently published by the Association of Accredited Naturopathic Medical Colleges in it’s 2020 Graduate Success and Compensation Study.
June 28, 2020
In recent weeks, two influential integrative health organizations each chose to feature presentations on the expansive, multidisciplinary, and remarkably patient-choice integrative pain pilot associated with the University of Vermont Medical Center (UVMC). The presentations for the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health and the Alliance to Advance Comprehensive Integrative Pain Management (AACIPM) featured the project’s remarkable, multi-stakeholder partners: the state’s dominant payer, Blue Cross Blue Shield, the Vermont Department of Health, and the academic medical center. Included in the latter was the project’s research leader, longtime integrative health policy activist and prior NIH National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health adviser Janet Kahn, PhD, LMT. The parties shared early outcomes from the unique bundled payment model. Many consider the strategy a potential pilot for the nation. What is being discovered? Can it be implemented elsewhere?
February 13, 2020
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.