International Congress of Integrative Medicine and Health: Meeting in Las Vegas, May 17-20: Update and Highlights

International Congress of Integrative Medicine and Health:  Meeting in Las Vegas, May 17-20:  Update and Highlights

Welcome to the May issue of the Health and Wellness Catalyst Blog

I recently got back from this educational and enjoyable meeting and wanted to give you an update on what I found:

1.     First, it was a gathering of almost 800 people – physicians, psychologists, nutritionists, acupuncturists, naturopaths and other similar practitioners, and other stakeholders - from all over the world.  Most of the attendees are members of the Academic Consortium For Integrative Medicine and Health, composed of over 60 member university hospitals and/or medical schools from North America – to get more info on them or to find a local member organization, go to www.imconsortium.com. 

2.     The research on integrative medical and health approaches to many diseases and conditions is expanding quite rapidly – that is an important step forward since this model of care and research of integrative care will help in the understanding of both practitioners and clients, resulting in more integrative approaches to common conditions and diseases.

3.     I presented three posters at the conference, which all were received well – these included:

a.     A research poster: Perceived stress in patients with common gastrointestinal disorders:  Associations with quality of life, symptoms and disease management

b.     An Integrative Nutrition Consultation Practice in a Suburban Philadelphia Counseling and Therapeutic Center

c.      Targeted Cancer Coaching for Cancer Survivors:  Individual and Group Programs to go From Surviving to Thriving

I also want to summarize a couple of keynote presentations that were very interesting and inspiring:

I.               Well-Being is a Skill:  Perspectives from Affective and Contemplative Neuroscience, by Richard Davidson, PhD, Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin.

This was a really interesting talk by the researcher who has been visited about ten times by the Dali Llama and challenged by him to focus on health and well-being, and happiness, as opposed to disease.  He described four constituents of Well-being including: (a) Resilience; (b) Positivity; (c) Attention-presence (he said that a “wandering mind is an unhappy mind;” and (d) Generosity.  The last, generosity is not as well validated as he would like to see.

He also talked about compassion training – it does not take a lot of practice to see brain activity changes using scanning techniques.  Positive effects were shown for adults who did the training for 30 minutes per day for two weeks.

II.             Pain and the Brain: Conceptual and Clinical Considerations, by Lorimer Moseley, PhD, University of South Australia.

This was a fascinating discussion of pain and neuroscience, which he developed and is continuing to research.  His basic premise, if I understand it correctly, is that we have a tissue tolerance level of pain and that we continually ‘protect ourselves’ from pain.  However, if we are continually protecting ourselves we are reacting significantly or over-reacting to pain when we don’t really need to.  He therefore suggests that we acknowledge pain but identify when it hurts but that we are safe and not needing to react so much or over-react. 

Another interesting story which he described and illustrates the power of  the mind-body connection or interaction involved reported pain and swelling in a study – it showed that people who looked through binoculars that enlarged their swollen hand reported more pain and swelling than those who looked through it and saw a smaller and less swollen hand – cool experiment!

His books that describe his approaches to pain and people with pain are, The Explain Pain Handbook Protectomer, 2015; and Painful Yarns: metaphors and stories to help understand the biology of pain, 2007.

I also had some fun meeting new people at the conference and did get into Las Vegas one evening to enjoy a great Italian meal at the Venetian Casino – it was painful to not be able to take home leftovers!  So all in all, it was a really good conference and trip, enjoyable, and helpful to promote some of my current research and activities that will move forward.