NCCIH Research Blog

The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) will celebrate the conclusion of its 25th anniversary year with a symposium, Exploring the Impact of Whole Person Health. The event will take place on Monday, December 2, from 1 to 4:30 p.m. ET on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland and will also be livestreamed via NIH VideoCast. A reception will follow the symposium. Please register to attend. 

The symposium will feature NCCIH’s annual Stephen E. Straus Distinguished Lecture in the Science of Complementary Therapies delivered by Patricia M. Herman, N.D., Ph.D., senior behavioral scientist at RAND Corporation and co-director of the RAND Research Across Complementary and Integrative Health Institutions Center. Dr. Herman will speak on the “The Economic Impact of Whole Person Health” and make the case for transforming health care from a disease-centric approach to a whole person model. She will illustrate how an investment beginning in early middle age to support a healthy diet, physical activity, and stress management can plausibly lead to improved health and well-being, as well as reduced health care spending. 

In addition, there will be two sessions considering the impact of real-world models of whole person health care. The first session will feature the team from the University of Vermont Medical Center comprehensive pain program that implemented a unique whole person model of pain care. The second will feature presentations from Emmeline Edwards, Ph.D., NCCIH’s director of extramural research, on the Center’s real-world research, and Lynn DeBar, Ph.D., M.P.H., of Kaiser Permanente, who has conducted pragmatic research on nondrug and other approaches for chronic pain. The symposium agenda is on the NCCIH website.  

This event is partially supported by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health with a generous gift from Bernard and Barbro Osher.