The Boston area has an extensive network of integrative medicine practitioners. In addition, there are more than 600 integrative medicine researchers across Harvard alone who are bringing together conventional and alternative medicine to create an integrative approach to health and healing.
Next month, researchers and practitioners alike will have the opportunity to come together at the Inaugural Integrative Medicine Research Forum, hosted by the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, on Monday, Nov. 3, 2014.
The goal of this unprecedented gathering is to bring together researchers, clinicians and educators with interests in integrative medicine research to find common ground, foster collaboration and start building a platform from which they can speak with one voice.
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“Harvard Medical School has a unique integrative medicine environment,” said Helene M. Langevin, director of the Osher Center and the HMS Bernard Osher Professor in Residence of Complementary and Integrative Medical Therapies at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “It has research and clinical centers dedicated to complementary and alternative medicine at several affiliate hospitals—the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Zakim Center for Integrative Therapies at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Cheng-Tsui Integrated Health Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center—as well as diverse leaders with integrative medicine interests at several Boston-area university medical schools and health care centers.”
The connections between the integrative medicine experts at these diverse Harvard-affiliated institutions have been illustrated in an online network map created by Exaptive, Inc.
The interactive tool appears on the Osher Center website. It pinpoints hubs of connection between integrative medicine researchers across Harvard by drawing on profiles from Harvard Catalyst | The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center and a database of published papers from PubMed.
One of the founding principles of Harvard Catalyst is to help connect the researchers who want to cure human disease, which the map represents dynamically.
Researchers with an interest in integrative medicine can use the network map to look up traditional directory information and see how they are connected to the various programs and centers in integrative medicine and to other researchers with an integrative medicine background.
The science of networking theory holds that hubs form in scale-free networks, and Boston seems to be one of these hubs for integrative medicine. In the scale-free model, hubs of connection are self-reinforcing, so hubs that are already connected tend to become more connected.
Now, the leaders of the Osher Center want to gather network members together at the half-day forum to provide a unique opportunity to further reinforce Boston’s integrative medicine hub by taking virtual connections identified in the online map and turning them into real partnerships.
For the first time, the leaders of all the HMS-affiliated integrative medicine centers will participate in a joint presentation at the forum.
Keynote speakers include Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, HMS lecturer in medicine at Brigham and Women’s and a pioneer in defining scale-free networks, and David King, founder of Exaptive. Barabasi and King will explore one of the conference themes, “What happens to a network when it becomes self-aware?”
The forum will feature networking opportunities, including a display of the Exaptive mapping technology with a real-time representation of the forum attendees demonstrating their distribution, interconnectedness and interests.
The hope is that the Inaugural Integrative Medicine Research Forum will help galvanize the connections among integrative medicine researchers at HMS.
The Inaugural Integrative Medicine Research Forum is free and will take place at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center in the New Research Building at HMS, 77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston, Mass., from noon to 6:30 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 3, 2014. Visit www.oshercenter.org to register online; you may also send email to hmsoshercenter@partners.org or call 617-525-8737.
