Digital Download - PowerPoint Synchronized with Live Audio

A major critique of integrative health care to date has been the limited attention the field has paid to the difficult questions of access to care for underserved populations. Although this may have been the case in the early days of the field, in recent years there are many groups working to make integrative care more accessible regardless of income. This session will have two areas of focus: information resources and practice models.

First, we will present the work of a national group called “Integrative Medicine for the Underserved,” which has worked over the past two years to develop an extensive web-based toolkit of resources for patients and practitioners in integrative approaches to health. This toolkit includes teaching materials and patient handouts describing evidence-based, affordable, and time-efficient integrative therapies for a range of common conditions, perfect for application in challenging settings such as the community health center or the neighborhood free clinic. We will demonstrate a number of these resources and share with participants the potential for how to use these in their practices. We will also discuss the potential use of these resources as teaching tools for practitioners in training, whether in primary care residencies, nursing, or CAM disciplines.

Second, we will present three stories of practice models that have found ways to overcome the constraints posed by under-insured and underserved patient populations, as illustrations of potential ideas for participants to try at home. One will be a community health center in NYC incorporating integrative approaches as part of a training model; the second will be a community acupuncture program; and the third will be a group-oriented patient empowerment model being used in Lawrence, Massachusetts.