Osher Center to Open in July

BWH will offer patients access to a full array of complementary and integrative care when it opens the Osher Center for Complementary and Integrative Medical Therapies at 850 Boylston St. in July. This outpatient facility will provide patients with care from a BWH team of credentialed acupuncturists, chiropractors and massage therapists along with care providers from Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry, Rheumatology, Orthopedics, Nutrition and Physical Therapy.

“The Osher clinical model puts patients at the center of our care team where, with the guidance of our expert clinicians, they can be thoughtfully directed to access therapies to optimize their care,” said David Eisenberg, MD, director of Integrative Medicine at BWH and the Bernard Osher Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

The Center also will serve as a research incubator through which access to complementary and integrative care can be evaluated for efficacy, safety and mechanisms of action. “Ultimately, we expect our patients will experience improved outcomes and an overall reduction in medical costs,” Eisenberg said. “We have the good fortune to be able to document this as the unit is hard wired to a research infrastructure.”

The Center opening follows a successful pilot study of 20 patients suffering from back pain. The IRB-approved pilot, funded through support from the Bernard Osher Foundation and a National Institutes of Health grant, brought together attending physicians from Orthopedics, Neurology, Rheumatology and Internal Medicine with a nurse practitioner, physical and occupational therapists, chiropractors, acupuncturists, massage therapists, mental health and mind body experts, and nutritionists to develop an “integrative care team.”

The center providers trained together for six months through a series of presentations on each other’s disciplines and then treated volunteer patients in a “fish bowl” setting. At the end of training, the team conducted the pilot study in which one third of the patients underwent “usual care” and two-thirds were offered complementary and integrative care in addition to usual care. Patients in the study were recruited from BWH’s Occupational Health Clinic and Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates. Although the sample was small, the results were clinically and statistically highly significant. “There was a lot of skepticism on the part of the participating physicians early on,” said Eisenberg. “But following the pilot, we’ve had more than 200 patient referrals from these same physicians to their complementary care colleagues.”

The Osher Center also will be a site for clinical research overseen by the HMS Osher Institute/Division for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative Medical Therapies, which is also under the direction of Eisenberg. Research conducted in the BWH Center will broaden the base of knowledge in complementary and integrative care. The HMS Osher Institute is leading projects that include herbal/botanical research, pain-related studies, placebo research, acupuncture, yoga, and tai-chi research and nutritional research. Research findings will be published in leading peer reviewed health and medicine journals.

For more information about patient referrals, contact Mark Cunningham at 617-384-8582 or Mark_Cunningham@hms.harvard.edu