Brief Notes: Personnel Changes, Organization Action

Summary:  Bill Meeker, DC, MPH takes over presidency of Palmer West, Christine Choate, DC, PHD to lead Palmer's research ... Jeanne Achterberg, PhD, moving the frontier of medicine ... Pain experts learning integration from James Dillard, MD, DC, CAc ... Update on the Jahnke/McLean Health Action, plus James Strohecker, PhD's new Wellness Inventory ... Lori Knutson, RN, named AHNA's Holistic Nurse of the year ... and association action from SAR, AANP, IAF, IAYT and more ...

Meeker and Choate: Changes at Palmer Chiropractic College

William Meeker, DC, MPH

Palmer College of Chiropractic has announced that William Meeker, DC, MPH, has been named as president of the college's West Campus, in San Jose, California. Meeker, a 1982 graduate of Palmer West, is a well-known leader of the chiropractic profession. He served most recently as executive director of research for Palmer College, his base as primary investigator on a major NIH NCCAM center grant for chiropractic research. Palmer has a third campus, in Port Orange, Florida. Peter Martin, DC, president of the Florida campus, had been jointly serving as interim president at the San Jose campus.

Christine Choate, DC, PhD

The move at Palmer also provoked a change for Integrator advisor Christine Goertz Choate, DC, PhD, until recently the deputy director of the Samueli Institute for Information Biology. Choate, a long-time colleague of Meeker, will become leader of the Palmer Center for Chiropractic Research. She will remain in the Beltway, her current base, and work out of a new Palmer office. In her role with Palmer she will also, according to the release, "monitor and coordinate government relations work relative to the profession." Choate has a long research resume which includes a period as program officer for health services research at NIH NCCAM, for which she remains an advisor. Choate maintains a faculty position at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, in Bethesda, Maryland.

Achterberg: Next Step in Frontier Medicine?

Jeanne Achterberg, PhD

Pioneering mind-body and frontier medicine researcher Jeanne Achterberg, PhD is "on a hunt for an imaging facility" to stage would she believes will be "another groundbreaking study" - this one proposed to her by her colleague Larry Dossey, MD, and dealing with "mirror neurons." Achterberg told the Integrator that she has "a low tolerance for the mundane and a persistent desire to seek the next dimension in healing," which she acknowledged is "a frequently exhausting enterprise." Achterberg, now based in Monterrey, California, after some years working on the Big Island at North Hawaii Community Hospital, is willing to pick up and move to right facility to engage the research that is her passion. She can be contacted through her website.

James Dillard, MD, DC, CAc

James Dillard, MD, DC, CAc is the featured presenter on complementary and integrative medicine strategies for the North American Pain Forum. Dillard, an assistant professor of clinical rehabilitation medicine at Columbia University tells the Integrator he's already presented to over 16,000 pain specialists in this series of forums which have a goal of reaching over 100,000 practitioners. Says Dillard: "It's very evidence-based. I like to show these doctors that they can do these things and not lose their scientific rigor. It's an opportunity to convince people to stray outside of their fairly limited range of drugs, injections and surgeries." The forums are produced in collaboration with the American Pain Society (the most conservative of the professional pain societies) and the Foundation for Better Health Care. 

Roger Jahnke, OMD

Rebecca McLean

Jahnke, McLean, Strohecker: Health and Wellness Initiatives

Author, consultant and co-founder of Health Action, Roger Jahnke, OMD, shares that over 200 health coaches have now been trained through Health Action, which he founded with his partner and spouse Rebecca McLean. McLean took the lead in developing a Circle of Life mind-body wellness and coaching program which the two have have offered to scores of clients nationally. Jahnke serves on the national advisory council of the National Health Wellness and Convention Congress (NHWCC), a gathering which meets this week alongside the national conference of consumer directed health plans ...

James Strohecker

One of Jahnke's fellows on the NHWCC advisory council, James Strohecker, president and co-founder of Health World Online, the flagship alternative medicine and wellness site, is presently focusing on the wellness side of that mix. Strohecker is active with a new venture, the Wellness Inventory, a "whole person assessment program." Strohecker was the first, significant resource on the range of alternative medicines, Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide.

The first Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research, scheduled for January 18-21, has 800 reservations, it's maximum. This initiative of the International Association of Yoga Therapists appears to have met a yearning. IAYT published a complete issue of the IAYT-sponsored Integrator series on the Future of Yoga Therapy in the December 2006 issue of Yoga Therapy in Practice ... 

The last date for abstract submissions for the IN-CAM Mini Symposium of the

The American Association of Naturopathic Physicians has recently focused its resources on developing relationships with the