Integrator Blog News & Reports

Integration, by nature, asks us to open our peripheral visions. We are served to look at the whole of the field. We need to develop new fascia, new connectivity. Opportunities crop up in new places. The Integrator Blog News and Reports is meant to provide you with information, insights and tools to enhance integrated care in the environment you serve.
- John Weeks, publisher-editor

The Coming of the Light! A Solstice-Celebrating Integrator Top 10 from 2006
For the impatient, progress is always caught in a traffic jam. Looking back, we see how far we have come. The year of 2006 has seen many advances for the multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder field of integrated health care. This article, published on the winter solstice, provides you with the Integrator Top 10 from 2006 - with links, should you wish to explore them further. Send your suggestions, disagreements, and reflections. Here's to the coming of the light! Link

Working Class Acupuncture: Revolutionary Model Creates Access, Fosters Business Potential
Lisa Rohleder, LAc, and her partners at Portland, Oregon-based Working Class Acupuncture argue that the best way to integrate acupuncture into the health care of US citizens is to radically restructure the practice. They recommend a sliding scale ($15-$35), high volume practice which is delivered in community rooms. Rohleder and her group feel they have proved the model and are now rolling it out the model nationally through development of a Community Acupuncture Network which already boasts 19 members. Rohleder suggests that the approach may not only be a "remedy" for acupuncture's access issues, but also for the problems many licensed acupuncturists have in creating live-able incomes through acupuncture practice.Link

Good Samaritan Hospital and Emperors College Engage Cost/Care Project Looking at Broad, Trusting, Inpatient Look at Well-Integrated Acupuncture
Well-integrated acupuncture, as provided by licensed acupuncturists, is finally getting a test in inpatient care in a US hospital. Through relationships built between Los Angeles' Good Samaritan Hospital (GSH) and Emperors College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jeannette Painovich, LAc, DAOM will soon be managing a $218,500 research project. LAcs will practice side-by-side with conventional MDs and nurses in treating a whole array of critical conditions. Clinical, patient satisfaction and cost outcomes will be measured, with a particular focus on potential savings in the area of length of stay. A key element in the set-up is the acupuncture profession's new Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (DAOM) clinical doctorate, through which GSH will have its acupuncture clinicians. The project has more potential for impact on US health care than any dozen acupuncture RCTs.Link

Portrait of the AOM Profession Via 6 Years of Acupuncture Today Polls
Since 2000, Acupuncture Today has presented its readers with a monthly poll on topical issues: priorities for the profession, practice style, educational influences and the always controversial: Should MDs, DCs and NDs be allowed to practice acupuncture. While there are no controls on the site regarding who can register an opinion, and participation rates very significantly from question to question, the impressionistic picture, if dangerously un-controlled, has its intriguing elements.Link

Payne on a University-Based, Integration-Oriented Yoga Therapy Rx Program: What Part in Yoga's Future?
This penultimate article in the Future of Yoga Therapy series examines the program Larry Payne, PhD offers through Loyola Marymount University extension: a certificate program that prepares Yoga therapists to work in close association with medical doctors, chiropractors and other health care professionals. More of CAM and less of Ayurveda is the way Payne describes it. Will this training of Yoga practitioners become an important line in the field's maturation? Is there a loss in this direction? This Integrator series is sponsored by the International Association of Yoga Therapists.Link

The Integrator is made possible through sponsorships from NCMIC, Triad Healthcare, Standard Process, Alternative Medicine Integration Group, Health Practitioners Online and individuals who voluntarily contribute.