New JACM Column Partnership with the Osher Collaborative for Integrative Medicine

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In the late 1990s in North America, the public interest in complementary and traditional medicine products, practices, and practitioners began taking organized form inside conventional academic medicine. Chaotic emergence of complementary and alternative medicine initiatives in multiple medical schools began to fuse into a movement for advancing research and practice on “integrative medicine” and later, “integrative health.” An organization and research meetings were created.

Over the ensuing two decades, the “integrative” term and concept—capturing the actuality of typical public practice—started spreading globally. ¹ Some began to see the connection with the World Health Organization's (WHO) strategy for traditional medicines. The alignment was embedded in the 2016 Stuttgart Declaration ² and the 2017 Berlin Agreement. ³ The WHO recently acknowledged the shared and overlapping purposes, research challenges, and strategic imperatives by formally renaming its initiative “Traditional, Complementary, and Integrative Medicine.” ⁴

Into this dynamic environment—dynamic for academia!—came an announcement ⁵ last fall of a $5.5-million gift “to support academic integrative medicine internationally.” The source was the Bernard Osher Foundation. The recipient was the first of six academic integrative medicine centers that the foundation has established over the past two decades, the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The two-decade-old center received the endowment on behalf of a present constellation of now six such Osher Centers: UCSF (1998), Harvard (2001), Karolinska (2005-Sweden), Northwestern (2014), Vanderbilt (2014), and Miami (2017). The immense integrative reach of the Osher Collaborative is described in the interactive Osher Collaborative Network Map. ⁶

The focus of the endowment will be to create better coordinating between the centers and thus facilitating collaboration. This is for essentials such as staff, communication, meeting planning, project management, and related infrastructure that will make exchanges more efficient and magnify the value of each of the center's learning and contributions to enhance “the collective impact on health and well-being.” All well and good. Yet what will the collaborative initiatives be and how might these send waves that support engagement of research, paradigm, practice, and policy challenges in the field globally?

JACM is pleased to announce that one of the newly endowed Osher Collaborative's first projects is a partnership that will connect them with researchers, educators, clinicians, and policy makers across 170 nations. This is JACM's reach. Once each quarter, members from the Osher Collaborative will produce an invited commentary as part of the Osher Collaborative Forum: Outlooks, Opinions and Opportunities.

The first, in this issue, strikes an expansive note. Maria Chao and Shelley Adler from the UCSF Center examine links between integrative medicine and health justice. The timely theme asks us to take the whole person integrative perspective beyond the clinical frame. The subject is well aligned with the focus of the June 2018 conference of the Integrative Medicine for the Underserved (IM4US) organization, which will be held in Washington, DC: “Justice and Equity in Policy and Practice.” ⁷ The focus on health justice reflects the WHO's mission to optimize the use of traditional, complementary, and integrative products, practices, and practitioners in providing primary care for all. A good launch for the column.

We are proud of this new JACM partnership with the Osher Collaborative for Integrative Medicine. We are pleased to provide this opportunity for them to consider their global audience as they fulfill on their aspirations to contribute internationally. We look forward to serving as a vehicle for stimulating dialogue—and receiving your letters in response—as part of JACM's ongoing focus on paradigm, practice, and policy advancing integrative health.