The Osher Center for Integrative Medicine is a collaboration between Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The administrative offices are housed within the Division of Preventive Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the clinical team is based at the Osher Clinical Center located at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 850 Boylston Street, Chestnut Hill, Boston, MA.
Mission
To advance ‘whole person health,’ encompassing mind, body, spirit, and community, through pioneering research, education, and clinical care.
Vision
A unified and integrated healthcare system that treats, heals, and empowers all people to lead their best lives on a healthy planet.
To achieve our mission and vision, we focus on four key areas:
1. Researching innovative approaches to whole person health
2. Delivering compassionate care through evidence-based integrative treatments and services
3. Educating the next generation of healthcare providers and researchers to advance a unified and equitable healthcare system and improve people’s lives
4. Curating and sharing principles and practices of whole person health for all people.
What is Integrative Medicine?
We view integrative medicine as more than the sum of conventional and alternative medicine, but also as a path to a deeper understanding of basic physiology, health and disease that underlies both. A current limitation of conventional medicine is its organization into separate physiological systems, and a consequently fragmented approach to therapeutics.
Our integrative view of health is holistic and emphasizes interconnections between mind and body, and across physiological systems. We therefore aim to expand our understanding of basic biological processes by which any therapy, alternative or conventional, can impact disease and restore health.
A Center ‘Without Walls’
In order to fulfill its mission, the Osher Center has established a “center without walls” consisting of interdisciplinary networks in translational research, medical education, and clinical care across the Harvard Medical School (HMS), with additional ties to the ten additional Osher Centers.
History
The Osher Center at HMS was created in 2001, with support from the Bernard Osher Foundation. Under the leadership of its founding Director, Dr. David Eisenberg, early successes included the publication of seminal papers on the prevalence and patterns of use of alternative medicine in the United States.
In 2010, the Osher Center underwent a restructuring that disseminated its academic effort broadly across the HMS community while maintaining its clinical activities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Under the leadership of Dr. Helene Langevin since 2012, the Osher Center has fostered an expanding academic and clinical network connecting the Boston integrative medicine community.
The Osher Collaborative
The Osher Center at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital is one of eleven international academic Centers funded by The Bernard Osher Foundation. Together the centers comprise the Osher Collaborative for Integrative Medicine, which amplifies the impact of each center to to study, teach, and practice integrative medicine.