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CONTINUUM CENTER FOR HEALTH & HEALING LAUNCHES INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
NEW YORK (December, 2001) – The Continuum Center for Health & Healing (CCHH) - established June, 2000 by Beth Israel Medical Center’s parent company, Continuum Health Partners, Inc. - is the most comprehensive program undertaken by a US teaching hospital to bring integrative medicine into mainstream health care. Patients actively partner in their own health and healing within the context of fully integrative health care. Led by Executive Director Woodson C. Merrell, M.D., medical doctors work side-by-side with highly qualified and credentialed complementary practitioners to ensure the best of western medicine is integrated with safe and effective complementary/alternative modalities. These include acupuncture, bodywork (such as yoga and massage), mind-body techniques (meditation, biofeedback, imagery, self-hypnosis), chiropractic, homeopathy, nutrition, herbal medicine and more.
Beginning January, 2002, the Center will offer an innovative fellowship program directed by Medical Director Roberta Lee, M.D., and Associate Medical Director Benjamin Kligler, M.D., MPH, (who is also Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine). This will be one of only two such fellowship programs in the country, and the only program oriented toward training physicians in integrative primary care.
The vision of the program is to establish a prototype for integrative primary care, and to continue to develop new educational models in integrative medicine. It is intended to broaden the fellows’ point of view and equip them with the best of conventional and complementary mind/body healing tools before they move ahead to clinical practice and/or medical education, where they will hopefully be both leaders in integrative medicine and role models of healthful living.
“After a year and a half of practical experience creating a primary care model to serve the community,” says Dr. Kligler, “we recognize the depth of the need for more physicians to help us evolve the young field of integrative medicine. With this fellowship program we are taking another step toward becoming an international model of education and study for health care professionals.”
The fellowship program is open to anyone who has completed a primary care specialty (Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Family Medicine, OB/GYN) and is board certified or board eligible. Starting January 2002, it will accommodate two people, full time, for one year. The program will consist of a full range of clinical care experience among the Center’s interdisciplinary team of approximately 20 full-time medical doctors, registered nurses, nurse practitioners, psychotherapists and complementary care practitioners; case conflict and didactic training, along with exposure to clinical studies being conducted at CCHH. The Center’s research agenda includes quality control on supplements, outcome studies, and rigorously scientific, randomized clinical trials. Current studies include a pre-surgical relaxation program for women undergoing breast surgery; acupuncture and herbal strategies for asthma, and the effects of acupuncture and movement therapies on functional development in neurological disorders including stroke, brain injury and MS.
“Some of my colleagues who shared my past training are still struggling with ways to apply CAM data to their clinical domains,” says Dr. Lee, who was in the first graduating class of the Fellowship in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Medical Center. “Our fellowship curriculum will be structured in a very practical way, based on the real needs of real patients we see every day here at the Center.” Dr. Kligler agrees. “Both Roberta and I have patients who were at Ground Zero of the World Trade Center disaster. What these people need, as do all adults and children, now, and in the future, is appropriate primary care from a whole person perspective.”
For further information
on the Center for Health & Healing Fellowship Program and/or to obtain
an application, please contact: Louise Cook Continuum Center for Health
& Healing 245 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016 646-935-2252.
