News
The COVID-19 pandemic has generated greater interest in ways to strengthen the immune system. Our Collaborative members have shared their expertise on cultivating our body’s defense mechanisms with patients and with the broader community.
Osher Collaborative members are actively treating patients, engaging learners, publishing their perspectives, and developing research studies relevant to the COVID-19 outbreak.
UCSF Osher Center faculty member
Ashley Mason, PhD, has quickly launched a robust new study,
TemPredict, which aims to understand whether an algorithm can
predict the onset of symptoms, such as fever, cough, and fatigue,
associated with COVID-19. Participants wear a sensor, the Oura
Ring, that measures dermal body temperature, heart rate, and
related metrics.
UCSF Osher Center integrative geriatrician, Louise Aronson, MD, MFA, the author of the New York Times best seller Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, and Reimagining Life, has published multiple articles on ageism and COVID-19.
Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Faculty Development has announced a new Office for Well-Being (OWB) for which Darshan Mehta, MD, MPH, will serve as interim director.
David Vago, PhD, Research Director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine and director of the Contemplative Neuroscience and Integrative Medicine (CNIM) Laboratory at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, along with Amit Bernstein, PhD, University of Haifa, Israel, and Thorsten Barnhofer, PhD, University of Surrey, edited the Special Issue on Mindfulness in Current Opinion in Psychology.
10 Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement
Article excerpt:
For Helen Weng, her work as a neuroscientist, her lived experience as the child of Taiwanese immigrants, and her mindfulness practice are inseparable. Weng has spent the last 14 years investigating the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness meditation. What she’s observed as a racialized person in mindfulness circles has made her want to do things differently—and help to change the conversation for other minorities who meditate.
Helene Langevin, M.D., was sworn in as director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) on November 26, 2018. Prior to her arrival, she worked at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, jointly based at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston. Dr. Langevin served as director of the Osher Center and professor-in-residence of medicine at Harvard Medical School since 2012. She has also served as a visiting professor of neurological sciences at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine, Burlington.
The 2018 Annual Meeting of the Osher Collaborative was hosted by the Karolinska Institutet Osher Center in Stockholm, Sweden. In attendance were core leaders from each of the seven Osher Centers for Integrative Medicine, including members from our newest Osher Center at University of Washington. The Osher Collaborative members were joined by Bernard Osher, Barbro Osher, and Mary Bitterman, of The Bernard Osher Foundation.
National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., announced today the selection of Helene M. Langevin, M.D., C.M., as director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH). Dr. Langevin is expected to join NIH in November 2018.
The Harvard Medical School Research Fellowship in Integrative Medicine is a NIH-funded three year joint program of Harvard Medical School-affiliated teaching hospitals. The program accepts postdoctoral candidates including physicians, anthropologists, health behaviorists, sociologists, psychologists and integrative medicine (IM) providers with doctoral degrees who are interested in research training towards academic careers in integrative medicine.
The UCSF Osher Center’s Training in Research in Integrative Medicine (TRIM), is a research fellowship program funded by a T-32 Training Grant from NIH/NCCIH. They are requesting new applications for predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowship positions to begin August 2019..
With a $5.5 million grant from the San Francisco-based Bernard Osher Foundation, UW Medicine is strengthening its work in integrative medicine.
Nearly 50 members of the Osher Collaborative attended the 2018 International Congress on Integrative Medicine and Health, representing all 6 of our United States based Osher Centers.
Wolever, Ruth Q., Schwartz, E. Robert, and Schoenberg, Poppy L.A. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. Published Online: 2 May 2018
Osher Collaborative Forum: Outlooks, Opinions and Opportunities
2018 Award Winner: Cooking Up Health: Docs & Kids in the Kitchen
In 2016, an Alliance for Research in Chicagoland Communities (ARCC) seed grant award enabled the strong partnership foundation to address childhood obesity issues and foster the development of a sustainable program for the delivery of cooking and nutrition education in the community by future physicians. The unique Cooking Up Health is an elective course at Feinberg which teaches medical students about nutrition through the lens of culinary medicine and community health and hands-on cooking. The medical students then deliver the healthy habit messages to Chicago Public Schools elementary school students in underserved communities.
An Interview with Mind & Life Fellow, Helen Weng, PhD.
Helen is interested in how contemplative practices can improve communication within and between individuals, and how this in turn improves psychological and physical health. Her work is focused on developing a novel fMRI task to measure mindful breath awareness, using community-engaged approaches to adapt fMRI study procedures to underrepresented populations from diverse contemplative communities, and understanding how mindfulness-based interventions impact body awareness and psychophysiological variables.
In this provocative JACM article, “What Is the Point? The Problem with Acupuncture Research That No One Wants to Talk About,” Drs. Langevin and Wayne argue that failure to use clear terminology and rigorously investigate the subject of acupuncture points has hindered the growing legitimacy of acupuncture as an evidence-based therapy.
As lawmakers debate on bills that could impact the opioid crisis in Tennessee, people have been looking for alternative treatments to help with chronic pain and, in many cases, addiction. Steve Olson has been taking individual and group clinical hypnosis sessions at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine on West End in Nashville.
Social psychologist Judith Moskowitz, PhD, MPH, director of research at Northwestern Medicine’s Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, discovered the power of positive emotions 20 years ago when she was researching how men who were caregivers of their partners with HIV — a terminal illness at the time — coped with negative emotions and depression caused by their situation. Surprisingly, the caregivers wondered out loud why they weren’t asked about the positive, meaningful moments they experienced.