Making Integrative Medicine a Fundamental Part of Family Medicine Practice

The Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine in Tucson, Arizona is convening a small group of leading national health care practitioners to develop ways to further integrate integrative medicine practices into family medicine. This is being seen as a major step toward insuring that all doctors will ultimately receive training in integrative medicine.

As of the middle of 2022, there were as many as 200 family medicine sites in the United States and internationally that were using the center’s 200 hour curriculum to educate medical residents. The Family Medicine Residence Review committee has recommended to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) that it expand requirements to include language requiring new residents to be trained in “holistic clinically competent care” and “relationship-based communication.”

A core group of about a dozen leaders in integrative medicine around the United States has been invited to participate in the two-day visioning and strategizing sessions in the second half of 2023. Among the objectives  of the gathering will be to further explore the best ways to grow integrative medicine within family medicine practice, to establish new collaborations and partnerships, and to further develop an understanding of how to exert more influence on mainstream medicine.

Blackstone Ranch Institute has provided a grant to cover the costs of the gathering. It also provided earlier grants within the past dozen years to help launch an environmental medicine module within the center’s curriculum and support strategy sessions to further advance the Andrew Weil Center’s pioneering role in integrative medicine.