Fall 2005 - Volume 1

Giants in their fields, five leading physicians in the field of integrative medicine have been selected by the Bravewell Collaborative as finalists for the 2005 Bravewell Leadership Award, a $100,000 biannual award to celebrate and support visionaries who have committed their medical careers to transforming healthcare in America and ushering in the practice of a new medicine.

Through groundbreaking research, path-setting books, innovative clinical practices, advocacy for patient-centered care, and a commitment to educating the next generation of healthcare professionals, Bravewell Leadership Award finalists have made invaluable contributions to expand mainstream medicine from a narrow focus on curing disease to a broader understanding of health that addresses the wellness of the whole person — mind, body and spirit.

The recipient of this year's Bravewell Leadership Award will be announced at a gala benefit in New York City on November 10. Hosted by Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, the gala will salute all five outstanding finalists. Bravewell Collaborative member Christy Mack, who is chairing the Bravewell Leadership Award gala along with her husband John Mack, said, "Bravewell Award finalists have had the ingenuity and tenacity to help establish a growing body of rigorous scientific research that provides evidence of the compelling medical value of a wide range of treatment modalities and prevention strategies that are now being fully integrated into mainstream medical practice. Building model medical centers that support a satisfying doctor-patient relationship and restore the soul to medicine, they have also helped to prove that health care does not have to feel like an assembly line."

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Brian Berman, MD - Founder and Director of the University of Maryland Center for Integrative Medicine and Director of the Center for Integrative Medicine. Dr. Berman's breakthrough research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on the impact of acupuncture as a therapy for osteoarthritis of the knee was one of the largest randomized controlled trials in acupuncture to date. He has published over 120 peer-reviewed articles and books and has been the principal investigator of five major National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants. He chaired the NIH's first ad hoc advisory committee on alternative and complementary medicine and edited their first report, Expanding Medical Horizons.

James Gordon, MD - Founder and Director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C. Dr. Gordon is a pioneer in integrative medicine and developed the first major text in the field, Health for the Whole Person. Subsequent books have included Manifesto for a New Medicine and Comprehensive Cancer Care. His CancerGuides® Program trains health professionals to help people with cancer create comprehensive and integrative approaches to their care. He served as chair of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy from 2000 to 2002

Erminia Guarneri, MD, FACC - Founder and Medical Director of the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine in La Jolla, California. As an attending interventional cardiologist who had surgically implanted hundreds of intracoronary stents, Dr. Guarneri became convinced that heart disease needed more than a surgical solution so she founded a medical center that would blend the best of Western medicine and high technology with alternative medicine, mind-body healing and prevention strategies. Scripps is now one of the leading integrative medicine centers in the United States.

Dr. Kathi Kemper, MD, MPH - Caryl J. Guth Chair for Holistic and Integrative Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics, Public Health Services and Family and Community Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Dr. Kemper has been dedicated to advancing the integration of complementary medicine into pediatric practice and research. She founded the Section for Holistic and Integrative Medicine within the American Academy of Pediatrics and her book, The Holistic Pediatrician, serves as a key reference for families and pediatric educators and clinicians.

Dr. Dean Ornish, MD - Founder, President and Director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California. Dr. Ornish's clinical research has demonstrated that a comprehensive integrative medicine program can reverse the progression of coronary heart disease. By using high-tech, state of the art medical imaging technologies, Dr. Ornish and his colleagues were able to prove that ancient, low-tech and low-cost interventions such as diet, yoga, meditation and community support were effective. Used in more than 35 hospitals throughout the United States, his program was recently approved by Medicare.

More on the Bravewell Finalists at www.bravewell.org

As one of its first initiatives, the Bravewell Collaborative established the Bravewell Leadership Award and presented it in 2003 to Ralph Snyderman, MD, who was Chancellor for Health Affairs at Duke University and President/CEO of the Duke University Health System. Dr. Snyderman invested the award in establishing The Center for Research on Prospective Health Care at Duke University to study ways to develop and implement personalized preventative health care strategies. "Prospective medicine is about planning for health and empowering each individual to take responsibility for their wellness," Dr. Snyderman said. "Unfortunately, 75% of every dollar spent in health care occurs when irreversible damage has already occurred. We should focus on personalized disease prevention using all the wondrous tools of research for early detection and effective treatment. Even more importantly, we must promote better approaches to identifying individual susceptibilities to disease and providing individuals with better tools so they are empowered to promote their own health and wellness."

For information on attending the gala, contact David Rosenstock at (212) 838-2660 ext.13 or by email drosenstock@loreleievents.com.

Penny George: Co-founder and Chair

Meet Penny and Bill George as they discuss the strategies of the Bravewell Collaborative in this brief clip. View Video: Quicktime | Real Media

"Throughout American history, philanthropy has served as a catalyst for social change," says Penny George, co-founder and chair of the Bravewell Collaborative. "The 29 members of the Bravewell Collaborative share a strong belief that America's healthcare system is in crisis and that integrative medicine holds answers that can make a critical difference. In the past four years, we have looked for ways to support the growth of this promising field and to accelerate change."

Along with her husband Bill George, the former Chairman and CEO of Medtronic, Inc, Penny George founded the Bravewell Collaborative in 2002, with the original name Philanthropic Collaborative for Integrative Medicine. The operating foundation was the outgrowth of a seminal meeting of donors and physicians they convened in 2001 at the Miraval resort in Arizona. It was there that the idea for a national strategic philanthropic initiative to support integrative medicine took root.

Like many of the Collaborative's members, Penny George's interest in integrative medicine grew out of personal experience. After a breast cancer diagnosis in 1996, a mastectomy followed by chemotherapy and hormonal therapy put her cancer in remission. But being disease free alone didn't make her feel truly well. Like a growing number of Americans who are seeking out complementary therapies, George found that Chinese herbs, acupuncture and healing touch restored her energy and sense of health.

A practicing psychologist for more than twenty years, George gave up her business to become a full-time advocate for the establishment of integrative medicine as the new norm in American health care. "This new approach to medicine, which is evidence-based, wellness-oriented, patient-centered, cost-effective and compassionate, is a solution to the profound dissatisfaction with health care that we feel as individuals and a nation," says George. "Patients are not just diseases or symptoms, but whole people interconnected in body, mind and spirit, with internal resources for healing that they often don't even know about. We need to empower people to take charge of their own healing, to individualize their care, to help them heal even if they can't be cured, and to live high-quality lives in the face of chronic illness."

Penny and Bill George are active philanthropists at the local and institutional level. For example, through the George Family Foundation, they have contributed generously to help create a center for integrative medicine at the Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, the largest nonprofit medical facility in the Twin Cities. But as part of the Bravewell Collaborative, they are helping to drive change at the national level. She says, "There is a wonderful revolution in the making."

Establishing a New Curriculum for Medical Education

In 1910, the Flexner Report commissioned by the Rockefeller and Carnegie families revolutionized medical education and created a new paradigm for training doctors. Now, it is time once again for a paradigm shift.

Since 2002, the Bravewell Collaborative has committed resources to be a catalyst for change in medical education in partnership with the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine (CAHCIM). The Consortium was formed to help transform medicine and health care through rigorous scientific studies, new models of clinical care, and innovative educational programs that integrate biomedicine, the complexity of human beings, the intrinsic nature of healing, and the rich diversity of therapeutic systems. The Collaborative challenged CAHCIM's founders to develop a plan and an organizational structure for the Consortium to build its capacity to change the way physicians are educated in major health centers. Financial support from the Collaborative has helped CAHCIM to grow from seven centers into a vigorous organization of 27 institutions, including leading medical schools from across the nation from Harvard to Stanford and the University of Michigan to the University of Arizona.

The most critical need identified by physician leaders at Miraval was for fundamental change in the core curriculum for medical students at leading academic institutions. The Bravewell Collaborative made that an urgent goal, and significant progress has already been achieved. Recognizing that a growing number of medical schools were offering electives in the area of integrative medicine that reached only a limited number of enrolled medical students, CAHCIM created model curricular materials published as the Curriculum in Integrative Medicine: A Guide for Medical Educators, which is available at http://www.imconsortium.org/html/education.php.

Training the Next Generation of Physician Leaders

Systemic change is driven by leaders, and the Bravewell Collaborative is actively nurturing the next generation of physicians who can be leaders in the growth of integrative medicine and make the "new medicine" accessible to more people. Collaborative members, led by Colby and Lani Jones, have provided scholarship funding for 28 clinicians to participate in an innovative distance-learning fellowship program in integrative medicine that is offered by the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

The two-year, Internet-based program offers 1,000 hours of instruction in a wide range of modules including such topics as nutrition, musculoskeletal medicine, acupuncture and herbal medicine. Using the Web, email, on-line dialogue, articles, books, videos and audio recordings, the fellowship program enables physicians and nurse practitioners to participate in this educational opportunity without having to leave their practice or their home. Three residential weeks at the University of Arizona during the course of the two-year program provides the valuable opportunity for classroom training and to build community among the fellows. In addition, Bravewell Fellows receive supervision, training and mentoring on-site at integrative medicine centers around the country that are part of the Bravewell Clinical Network, a group of eight integrative medicine centers collaborating for systemic change.

The fellowship program has brought a new dimension to the medical education of physicians like Dr. Kevin Barrows. At the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California in San Francisco, Dr. Barrows had already started a meditation practice for patients and is currently researching if meditation can help slow the progression of disease in HIV patients. But despite his commitment to integrative medicine and his experience with this treatment modality, he found that the Bravewell Fellows program "stretches you, and asks you to go further to consider treatment options." He found a new passion in the herbal medicine module.

For Dr. Barrows' colleague, Dr. Steven Chen, herbal medicine was a familiar concept from his traditional Chinese upbringing. His grandfather was a farmer in China and had routinely used folk herbs, however Dr. Chen found that it was not a part of his traditional medical school curriculum at Stanford University. "Medical school didn't provide the space or time to study herbal medicine," he says. Dr. Chen pursued this knowledge in China and Taiwan, and finds that herbal medicine is expected among the Asian population he treats as a physician at a community health center in Oakland's Chinatown. As a Bravewell Fellow, Dr. Chen has been able to broadened his interest from herbal medicine to the spiritual aspects of integrative medicine as well as modalities like musculoskeletal medicine that he can introduce to his practice.

At Columbia University Health Services in New York, nurse practitioner Kathy Sanders has begun an integrative medicine working group with her colleagues to figure out how they can bring more CAM modalities into the student health services they offer. "The Bravewell Fellowship was such a gift," she says. "It would have been very difficult for me to afford." While her own practice had been traditionally allopathic, Ms. Sanders has begun offering students herbal therapies like ginger, chamomile and peppermint for a range of conditions including seasickness and migraines.

Dr. Daphne Miller, who teaches at the Osher Center and as an assistant professor at UCSF, has also been in private practice as a family physician for six years. "For patients with chronic disease, integrative medicine seemed to be the only model that met their needs," she explains. Like many physicians who use an integrative medicine approach, Dr. Miller said that much of her learning to date had been self-directed. Given the opportunity of the Bravewell Fellowship, "I was really interested to see what a formal training process would look like," she says, "and I felt that I had a lot to learn about different areas of integrative medicine. The nutrition module was terrific." In her capacity as a professor, she sees tremendous momentum for integrative medicine. "I feel a lot of optimism from the medical students who are coming through now. They are a different breed than a generation ago. They seem committed to finding a new model for health care." The Bravewell Collaborative is working to ensure that both academic training and hands-on clinical experience in integrative medicine will be more widely available for the next generation of physicians.

A Vision for the Future

The Bravewell Collaborative is a group of philanthropists who have come together to bring about optimal health and healing for individuals and society. There are many areas where integrative medicine is already playing a significant role in health care, including preventative medicine, patient empowerment, nutrition, complementary modalities and medical training curriculum enhancement. The Bravewell Collaborative is committed to supporting and accelerating these initiatives. The Collaborative's Declaration for a New Medicine expresses their vision for health care in America grounded in the values that characterize integrative medicine.

Please forward to colleagues who share your interest in integrative medicine.

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