Integrative Care

A Culture of Collaboration at an Integrative Health Center –
An Interview with David Fogel, MD –
Interviewed by Daniel Redwood, DC

The Chiro.Org Blog

SOURCE:   Topics in Integrative Health Care 2014, Vol. 5(3)

Daniel Redwood, DC

David Fogel, MD, is the cofounder (with his wife, Ilana Bar-Levav, MD), of the Casey Health Institute (CHI) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a nonprofit integrative primary care practice that includes Internal Medicine, Family Practice, Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Massage Therapy, Yoga Therapy, Naturopathic Medicine and more. He is board certified in Internal Medicine with additional specialty training in mind/body focused individual and group psychotherapy.

As an internist, he served in the National Health Service Corps and on the staff at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, providing primary care to medically underserved inner city Baltimore residents. He has held positions as Medical Director of Employee Health at NASA Headquarters and as Medical Director of Integrative Medicine Associates in Washington, DC. Dr. Fogel holds a B.A. from Hampshire College and is a graduate of the George Washington University School of Medicine. He completed his residency at Washington Hospital Center.

In this interview, Dr. Fogel describes his journey from conventional to integrative medicine, the unique circumstances surrounding CHI’s founding, the collaborative relationships that comprise its core, and the ways he hopes it can serve as a model for new methods of healthcare delivery that are both effective and cost-effective.

Tell us how you first branched out from the conventional approaches you were taught in medical school.

I was first exposed to the concept of chi as a teenager. It’s kind of the classic story — I was beaten up, and as a result I got into the martial arts. There, I learned this incredible concept, that there was energy running through your body. That you can channel it, that it can be used for healing. So that opened me up at a young age to exploring other things. Then, I went to a kind of hippie college, Hampshire College, which opened me up to non-conventional alternatives of all kinds. This included mind-body approaches. I concentrated in humanistic psychology.

I went on to medical school. This was the era when Nixon went to China, and suddenly there were acupuncturists in the DC area. I said to myself, I need to go to an acupuncturist just to experience what it is. The Traditional Acupuncture Institute in Columbia, Maryland was just opening up (now Maryland University of Integrative Health). I kept reading and exploring these sorts of things throughout medical school. Then, in the 1990s, when David Eisenberg published his landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine, about how many people were using complementary and alternative approaches, that gave a lot of people permission to start experimenting with different models, in a more mainstream or public way.

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Integration: A Conversation with the Neuroscience Institute

The Chiro.Org Blog

SOURCE:   ACA News ~ October 2013

By Christina Acampora, DC

It’s happening! More and more we see examples of outreach from the medical community to doctors of chiropractic (DCs). In February 2013, the physicians and staff of the Neuroscience Institute and Comprehensive Spine Center at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center invited all local DCs to a dinner and case presentation by Stephen Troyanovich, DC. The physicians who attended the presentation were seeking information and evidence on the proven health benefits of chiropractic. As someone who spends her days educating and assisting DCs with how to become more integrated, I am always intrigued as to what the mechanisms are behind this phenomenon. I asked for an interview, and, in keeping with its friendly February outreach, the Neuroscience Institute was more than accommodating in granting me time in June 2013.

In attendance:

DR. ACAMPORA: It seems that despite evidence based research illustrating the benefits of manipulation, chiropractic care continues to be a medical treatment of last resort or one into which patients often self-refer. Why do you think that is?

DR. CANDIDO: I think, by and large, people who do interventional pain medicine were always aware of [chiropractic as] the other side to the coin — in other words, alternative therapies — but we had very little appreciation or knowledge of these therapies during our training and early on in our practices. We tend to refer to the people we are most familiar with, to send our patients where we expect we’ll have easy access to them and have them referred back to us in a timely fashion. Chiropractic, while it’s something I have always been interested in, is something we don’t have immediate access to. We don’t have chiropractors on our faculty, in our pain practices or in our neurology or neurosurgery clinic. It’s been difficult to forge a bond or a relationship with people we don’t have immediately on our radar screens.

DR. SONG: For me, in my practice, it’s still about offering patients alternative therapies when they are not a surgical candidate, then letting them help guide their own care plan: chiropractic, physical therapy, acupuncture, yoga. It’s their choice.

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