Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and Integrative Medicine (IM) special interest group of the Society for Medical Anthropology
We had a great panel last week at the Society for Applied Anthropology Meetings! Thank you to our presenters: Darrel Manitowabi, Tim Ominika, Jennifer Rioux, and Peter Kundstadter, and to our discussant: Cheryl Ritenbaugh.
Sustainable Solutions: The Role of Complementary, Integrative, and Traditional Medicines in Addressing Contemporary Health and Social Issues (SMA)
CHAIRS: EAVES, Emery (NAU) and PENNEY, Lauren (STVHCS) Continue reading “Thank you to our presenters!”
Hello CAM/IM members. We had a relatively productive meeting at the AAA this year, although there were few attendees to our business meeting so we do not have official minutes to share. Impressions from graduate students we have talked to have told us last year and this year that the name of the SIG is not capturing the audience we are hoping for and our conversation about a more current name is ongoing. I visited panels with CAM/IM related topics and invited them to the business meeting as well as to the brunch we hosted on Saturday morning, which gathered a few more interested people who helped us strategize future directions for keeping the group current and vibrant. Continue reading “Updates and Plans for 2018”
Hello CAM/IM members and followers, below is a list of events and panels you may be interested in at the AAAs this week in Washington, DC. Please note our open business meeting and an informal brunch we are hosting on Saturday. We have a limited amount of funds to provide some refreshments for the brunch and we hope it will be an opportunity for more discussion. If you have students or colleagues who are interested in CAM/IM or related topics, please invite them! Continue reading “CAM/IM Events of Interest at AAAs”
Hello CAM/IM members, We are looking forward to seeing those of you who will be attending the AAA meeting in DC this November. CAM/IM would like to host a brunch meeting in addition to our open business meeting on Saturday morning, December 2nd, location TBA. We will provide refreshments to try to attract graduate students and others interested in our topic in a less formal setting. Once we have decided on a location I’ll send out an update. Please forward to students who might be interested and also join us yourselves if you’ll be there! Continue reading “CFP: SfAA 2018, Philadelphia, PA”
Many of you might have received this letter from the editor of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (JACM) in an email already. Apologies for any duplication. I’m sharing it here in case anyone is interested and didn’t receive it. I you’re not familiar with it, JACM may be an option to explore for publishing your CAM/IM related research.
Save the date for CAM/IM’s annual business meeting at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, to be held this year at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC, Wednesday, November 29 – Sunday, December 3
Our business meeting is open to the public and it is a chance to discuss business and vision for our group. If you will attend the meetings, please put the business meeting on your schedule!
(4-0705) Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA) Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Integrative Medicine Group Open Business (Community) Meeting
Friday, December 1 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM
We will put together a program listing of panels, presentations, and events of potential interest to CAM/IM members in October so please keep checking back!
Hello CAM/IM members, Mark Nichter shared this article that will probably be of interest to members of this group. The full text is available at the link below.
“Traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine approaches to mental health care and psychological wellbeing in India and China”
I’m a fan of Playtypus’ (somewhat) weekly roundup and Neuroanthropology’s frequent facebook posts. In my day-to-day work as a health services researcher I don’t have a lot of space to think about complementary and integrative health or anthropology per se. I’m using my first blog post to run through some recent articles and posts that helped me re-engage with anthropological perspectives around health and healing that may be of interest to others here. This list would have been better curated, but a colleague distracted me mid-week with a question about ethnography and complexity science that took me down a less related rabbit hole.
What are your favorite places on the internet related to complementary and integrative health or that help you to think more deeply about the work you’re doing? Do any of you keep blogs? Consider contributing a post to this one!
NPR covered a report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality on the potential benefits of yoga and mindfulness programs for girls in the juvenile justice system who have experienced trauma. Recently, I’ve been thinking more about military service-related and other trauma among veterans (particularly female veterans), and the U.S. Veteran’s Health Administration’s whole health model of care. (more to come in upcoming blog posts) Anthropologists have the potential to contribute (and continue contributing) good things to these efforts by studying, among other things, how these therapies are most successfully implemented and maintained, the ways in which complementary and integrative care are coopted by biomedicine, the new therapeutic lenses and processes they offer, the (different) outcomes they might encourage us to attend to. (See Emery’s post on an NCCIH funding opportunity)
On a similar thread: Super tiny pilot study that touches on placebo, patient expectations, and hope. What grabbed my attention were the idea of patients’ self-healing power, and importance placed on specific and non-specific treatment effects (which reminds me of complexity theory). The authors argue “the unspecific effects are produced by thorough anamneses, building trust, identification and agreement of a common understanding and mutual goals, being professional, taking control of the situation, and showing empathy and respect towards the patient.”
Do you incorporate visual methods in your work? It’s always one of the top three things I want to do, but it’s not something I’ve used effectively. This article on using photography to understand how people perceive happiness makes me want to do better.
This 2013 article about a farm training program for veterans recently showed up in a feed. It reminded me of the work of fellow Veterans Health Administration anthropologist Karen Besterman-Dahan and others to use community agriculture to help veterans transition back civilian life. In the article, Karen says, “’Veterans join the military because they want to make a difference in the world […] And coming back and being able to serve their community, this is a definite way and a very life affirming way.’” Both these articles offer opportunities to think about healing, identity, connectivity, and place in new ways.
A little over a year ago, I went on a “field trip” to several military simulation centers. At one, where troops were put through battlefield simulations to prepare for deployment, staff expressed interest in studying how simulations could be used to both identify people who might be at enhanced risk for developing PTSD and for helping provide exposure therapy for people who have developed PTSD in the field. Turns out, people have already been working on this. Back in April, Rolling Stone had a piece on how virtual reality is being used in exposure therapy for returned troops. The article quotes a doctor who calls this “‘hard medicine for hard problems.'” The treatment is described as addressing cognitive and behavioral parts of trauma. However, I wonder what insights anthropologists might bring to this using CAM/IM literature? Could ritual and performance be useful concepts here? Moral trauma? What about the social parts of these experiences? Others?
Even during the horrible (horrible) Texas summers, you’ll find me taking walking breaks around the hospital to help me think through issues or expend pent up energy. New-ish research out of Stanford provides evidence for how walking can facilitate creativity. The authors suggest that “any movement away from an emotional baseline is useful for creative thinking”. What gets you going and how do you sustain it?
If you have something you’re working on or read something you’d like to share with a short write up, please consider contributing a post to our blog! We’d like this to be vibrant, collaborative space for sharing ideas and receiving feedback.
Dear CAM/IM Members,
We would like to invite you to submit entries to be posted on CAM/IM’s new website (here). Please consider writing a book review, article review, reflection on your research, or other post that would be of interest to our community.
The purpose of this website is to foster collaboration and communication among anthropologists and other researchers interested in complementary and integrative medicine, alternative medicine, or similar areas of inquiry. When considering what to write, please consider how your piece fits into this mission. We do ask that you have an academic focus. Any submissions will be moderated by the SIG Chairs.
If you are interested in taking on the role of webmaster for the SIG, please send your self-nomination.
We are planning to feature interviews with researchers who have done interesting work in this field. If you would be interested to have your work featured, please get in touch with us.
Finally, we would like to post member profiles on our website. All it takes to be featured as a member on the page is desire to be a member. the Society for Medical Anthropology is currently working on how to track membership in the special interest groups. Once that is set up, we’ll share the information with you. For now, please check out our member profiles page and send us your information to include!
Please use the contact form to get in touch with the co-chairs, Emery Eaves and Lauren Penney, if you would like more information or to volunteer for any of the items listed above. We are excited about the interest we’ve seen in the site so far and look forward to using is as a way to be more connected with SIG members!
This funding opportunity may be of interest to CAM/IM members. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) is one of the centers participated in this PA. The text specific to what they are interested in is below. The full Program Announcement can be found here: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-16-261.html
NCCIH is interested in supporting research to develop and validate measures of mind and body interventions, including methodology to measure fidelity and adherence of subjects to mind and body interventions; measures to assess provider fidelity of implementation of the research protocol as part of the training process; research on measures of physical function in chronic pain populations; novel techniques for data analysis of mega data from body sensors to characterize physical function and/or participation in movement meditation therapies. Validation of less intensive sleep measures in comparison to standard validated measures in the context of chronic pain populations is also of interest, as is the development and validation of methodology or measures that will facilitate mechanistic research of mind and body interventions with a primary focus on meditative or mental aspects of these interventions. NCCIH will not support research proposing efficacy or effectiveness clinical trials with this funding opportunity.