How we seek to transform health care

Mission of the Foundation

To support the advancement of integrative medicine through training, research, the education of the public, and policy reform.

Our priority: Changing the training of health-care professionals

The Board of Directors believes that the Foundation can have the greatest impact by focusing its funding on a single well-defined strategy. The directors currently choose to focus Foundation funding on the reform of medical education.

To transform health care in keeping with the principles of integrative medicine will require progress of many kinds. Demonstration projects will be needed to test and refine the best clinical approaches. Research will have to demonstrate the efficacy of integrative medicine. Policy analysis will have to show that integrative medicine both improves health and reduces costs. Advocacy will be needed to educate elected officials and others who decide how health care dollars are spent. All of these goals deserve philanthropic support. But the Weil Foundation does not have funds enough to work on all of these fronts at once. Instead we will focus on the reform of medical education.

The current emphasis in the Foundation's grant-making is on efforts aimed at demonstrating that high-quality, affordable training in integrative medicine can be incorporated into all medical residencies.

Support from the Weil Foundation is helping three medical centers lead and participate in an important national pilot study of an innovative new four-year integrative medicine-family medicine residency, in which physicians learn family medicine and integrative medicine together. The project responds to several needs: Patients increasingly want to be treated by physicians trained in integrative medicine; physicians need such training; and leaders of medical education need to find ways to reverse the declining interest in family medicine among young physicians choosing a specialty. Early results indicate that the program enhances graduating medical students' interest in training in family medicine (Academic Medicine, June 2006).

The Foundation is also supporting the development of an innovative program - Integrative Medicine in Residency - that can be delivered through distance learning and incorporated into the regular three-year calendar of a conventional residency.

The Foundation also makes a small number of other grants consistent with this emphasis on making integrative medicine a routine part of medical education.

What is integrative medicine?

Integrative medicine emphasizes the innate healing capacities of the organism; views patients as mental-emotional beings, spiritual entities, and community members as well as physical bodies; addresses all aspects of lifestyle in evaluating health and illness; places great importance on the role of the practitioner-patient relationship in the healing process; and makes use of all appropriate therapies.

Practitioners of integrative medicine use less invasive, less expensive, and more natural treatments whenever possible, but they neither reject conventional therapies nor accept alternative ones uncritically. Instead, they are taught that good medicine is based in good science, that it is inquiry-driven and open to new paradigms.