{"id":99598,"date":"2015-01-07T10:41:32","date_gmt":"2015-01-07T15:41:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=99598"},"modified":"2023-06-27T13:11:20","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T17:11:20","slug":"learning-about-integrative-medicine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2015\/01\/learning-about-integrative-medicine\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning About Integrative Medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Mariah<\/a>
Mariah McAlister, a medical student, spent a year learning from a variety of integrative health care providers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Like most fourth-year medical students, UConn\u2019s Mariah McAlister is in the process of interviewing for prospective residency positions.<\/p>\n

Unlike most fourth-years, however, she brings the experience of having spent a year working with a variety of influential integrative health providers throughout the western hemisphere.<\/p>\n

A year and a half ago, McAlister stepped aside from the conventional medical school path and into the UConn School of Medicine\u2019s Scholarly Year, an enrichment program in which a student follows a custom-designed year-long curriculum to focus on a specific area of interest. For McAlister, it was anthropology and integrative health.<\/p>\n

\u201cI worked with and learned from brilliant healers in North, South, and Central America. Some were originally Western-trained MDs, and many were experts in other disciplines ranging from acupuncture to shamanism,\u201d McAlister says. \u201cI learned a little bit from each of them, and am inspired to eventually build my own practice based on aspects I witnessed in each of theirs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Shaman<\/a>
Shaman Don Antonio in the Peruvian rain forest, teaching about native plants. (Mariah McAlister)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of her interactions was in Peru observing an Amazonian shaman. Some cultures believe shamans can summon spirits to cure illness.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The shaman had] trained with village medicine men and women starting at 10 years old,\u201d McAlister says. \u201cThis was a particularly fascinating experience because his way of thinking about health, illness, life, death and the world in general is completely different from my own.”<\/p>\n

She spent time with him in the rainforest and helped with some of his healing ceremonies, sometimes acting as an interpreter for him and non-Spanish speaking patients.<\/p>\n

Her adviser and mentor, Dr. Mary Guerrera<\/a>, professor of family medicine and director of integrative medicine at UConn Health, helped McAlister create the enrichment curriculum, in part by using her contacts to connect McAlister with a dozen new mentors, with whom she spent about a month each.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s almost like having a sabbatical, taking a year to explore and having the opportunity to go into depth in a topic of their interest,\u201d Guerrera says. \u201cIt really opens up the opportunities for students to study across disciplines and to pursue interests that they\u2019ve cultivated at an undergraduate level. In Mariah\u2019s case, it was anthropology. This was a natural manifestation of her interests and how they intersect with health and healing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"McAlister<\/a>
McAlister learned about the medicinal uses of passionflower with the shaman while on a rainforest trek in Peru. (Mariah McAlister)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Integrative health is a term that refers to the combination of evidence-based medicine and alternative medicine for which there is evidence of efficacy and safety. Alternative medicine refers to therapies such as acupuncture that are not part of traditional \u201cWestern\u201d medicine.<\/p>\n

Another of McAlister\u2019s months was spent with a rural naturopath and Chinese medicine doctor in Northern California who functioned as the local family doctor in a town that had no other physicians.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved observing how he analyzed his patients’ complaints with both a Western mindset (naturopaths receive similar foundational training as MDs), and from a Chinese medicine perspective,\u201d McAlister says. “He would then choose whether to use lab tests or referrals to Western specialists, or would treat with acupuncture and herbs. Often he would do both.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"McAlister<\/a>
McAlister picked chamomile, or manzanilla, with the herbalist in Guatemala among other herbs to make a decoction for parasites. (Mariah McAlister)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

McAlister says she chose UConn for medical school in part because of its membership in the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine, which seeks to advance integrative health care principles and practices at North American academic medical centers.<\/p>\n

Richard Zeff<\/a>, assistant dean of medical school admissions, says generally between two and five UConn medical students take a Scholarly Year each year. While McAlister was interested in learning more about integrative medicine for her project, other students have pursued their interests in medicine through research and other scholarly activities.<\/p>\n

The director of the Scholarly Year program, Dr. Joan Caron<\/a>, says the students undergo significant intellectual development while integrating their scholarly ideas with the direction they want to pursue in their medical career. \u201cA maturity develops in these students that is amazing to see,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

McAlister brought her experience back not only to the UConn School of Medicine, but also to the American Medical Student Association. She is organizing the student-run elective \u201cHumanistic Elective on Activism, Reflective Transformation, and Integrative Medicine<\/a>\u201d that the Association will offer in the spring in Ben Lomond, Calif. In October, she was an invited guest speaker at the Symposium of Integrative Medicine Professionals, held in Albuquerque, N.M.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s helped me tremendously already,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most revealing concept I learned during my enrichment year,” she adds, “was that the therapeutic relationship is at the heart of healing. Whether I was with a pediatrician doing hypnosis for bedwetting, a rural naturopath doing acupuncture to relieve nasal congestion, or an Amazonian shaman chanting an \u2018icaro\u2019 to help a woman let go of the pain from her divorce, it was the practitioner\u2019s healing presence that appeared to most affect the patients. I watched as people entered the room with burdens, and left the encounters at ease and inspired to take an active role in their own healing process.\u201d<\/p>\n

McAlister plans to be an integrative family medicine physician working in a collaborative setting and advocating for health justice.<\/p>\n

Follow <\/em>UConn Health<\/em><\/a> on <\/em>Facebook<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Twitter<\/em><\/a> and <\/em>YouTube<\/em><\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A medical student in the Class of 2015 describes her year away from medical school and how it enriched her education in integrative health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":111,"featured_media":99673,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[88,179,1,2234],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[57,2010],"class_list":["post-99598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-global-affairs","category-uconn-health","category-uncategorized","category-university-life"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-29 05:29:12","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/111"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99598"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99681,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99598\/revisions\/99681"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/99673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99598"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=99598"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=99598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}