The Center for Health & Healing
has provided integrative healthcare by primary care and specialty physicians as well as expert practitioners of diverse healing traditions at 245 Fifth Avenue, NY for over 16 years.
Please visit us at
Center for Health and Healing at Mount Sinai Doctors for your continued care.
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Center for Health and Healing at 245 Fifth Avenue will close on October 28, 2016
After 16 years of comprehensive and innovative clinical practice, research and education in the field of Integrative Healthcare, the Center for Health and Healing will be closing its location at 245 5th Avenue, New York, NY on November 1, 2016.
Several of our physicians will be relocating at that time to:
Center for Health and Healing at Mount Sinai Doctors
52 W 8th St (at 6th Avenue)
New York, NY10011
Providers
Sapna Chaudhary, DO (Family Medicine)
Pamela Hops, MD (Family Medicine)
Emily Hartzog, MD (Gynecology)
Natalie Moulton-Levy (Dermatology)
Berestrand William, MD (Family Medicine)
Our work over this past 16 years has been dedicated to evidence-based clinical practice, research and education in integrative healthcare. We hope we have helped move it into the mainstream of medicine as it is practiced today. We have been honored to collaborate with our patients and their families over this time and to bring our hearts, minds and spirit to this collaboration. We are honored to have worked with inspired, committed and informed colleagues in every aspect of the Center's functioning.
We thank everyone who has supported us in this endeavor over the years and are grateful for their belief in our work and vision for a more humanistic and inclusive approach to health and wellness.
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Thoughts from our CenterPoint Editor
Sezelle Haddon, MD
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go,my dear....
I start my final post to you as editor of Centerpoint with the words of the non-conformist poet, ee cummings. Meant to shock us, to break out of convention, and to engage the reader, Cummings demonstrates the emotion between two deeply intertwined. He captures what the Center for Health and Healing has meant for so many of us. A bold place, filled with persons of like mind, all seeking a common good. Yes, a place where you woke up, paid attention and loved walking in the doors every morning.
Patients, providers and staff will understand why I have chosen this bit of poetry to convey my feelings about the Center. We have all been fortunate to work in a place that changed lives - and while many came seeking healing, we as providers were healed as well. We learned a new construct of patient care, one outside of what we were taught in medical school. We were forced to look at the world in a way that we never had before. It was impossible not to be touched by a sense of possibility and hope - from the beauty of the surroundings, to the warmth and caring of the staff, to the complexity of patient scenarios. In our camaraderie we collectively sought to find new ways of helping our patients to heal. We were called on to be our best selves. To never practice medicine the same way again.
I know that I speak for us all to say that the experience of this place has changed us forever.
And so we bid farewell to The Center for Health and Healing where we all practiced, grateful to have it in our hearts...
.....here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
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Thoughts from our Center Leadership and Staff
Founding Executive Director
 THANK YOU AND GOODBYE FOR NOW
For a shining period in our recent history the Center for Health and Healing (CHH) of Beth Israel Medical Center/Mt Sinai Beth Israel (BI) has been a beacon of enlightened healthcare; not only for the metro NY area but for a nation and globally. The influence of what we have done together to create a healing environment where patients and staff feel equally cared for cannot be underestimated.
In the rougher early days of what used to be called Alternative, then Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) practice when arch-conservative skeptics were all too active in trying to prevent providers from offering patients gentler effective approaches to health and wellness, BI stepped up and formally created a bastion of academic healthcare with complementary practices at its core. In 1998! This was visionary and courageous. All of us have been privileged to be part of this evolution---at nearly revolutionary speed in the last 15 years.
As CHH closes its current location, it is worthwhile to recount some of the historical highlights of the last 17 years.
CHH was founded when the Center's godfather William Sarnoff, a long-time member of the BI Board of Trustees, proposed having CAM modalities available to the public as part of BI's offerings. BI had a long history of offering services not available at most of NY's other academic institutions: Japan Clinic, Russian Clinic, Family Medicine's Urban Institute (primarily for the underserved), the area's largest network of Addictive Disorders Clinics, the Robert Mapplethorpe Home, a holistic nursing program, and a Chair of the Credentialing Committee who was a practicing homeopath. A think tank was called in August 1997 with the then Board Chair Mort Hyman agreeing to Mr. Sarnoff's desire to look into whether this kind of program should be established. Who would take two days in the height of vacation season to come to this? Only the Chairs of Medicine, Surgery, Plastic Surgery, Family Medicine, Physiatry and Nursing, CEO, COO and CMO, a Board of Trustees Credentialing Committee member, and representatives of Departments of Human Resources, Legal, and Medical Staff Services---and a few expert witnesses including myself (at the time working at another institution).
After two days of deliberation, it was concluded that CAM (as it was called then) medicine was the future of healthcare and Beth Israel was going to offer the best evidence-based services in it for everyone. Once again they saw themselves as providing services wanted by the community that differentiated them from the rest---as described to me by prominent members of the above group. In summer 1998 I accepted the position of executive director offered by then-President Matt Fink after a formal search was completed. I was then very fortunate to have been able to assemble an amazing team---who met continuously, planning the Center for nearly a year: Ben Kligler, MD, MPH, Barbara Glickstein, RN, MPH and Cathy Schaffer, MBA. Ben and Barbara were long-time employees of Beth Israel who helped smooth the way into the system and Cathy had just returned from two years in Mexico helping to make an indigenous clinic functional after getting her MBA from Columbia.
I also want to pay homage to the original Steering Committee appointed by the hospital to guide the Center's development: current Family Medicine and Credentialing Chair Dr. Red Schiller and former Chief of Cardiology (now with same position at Stamford Hospital's Integrative Medicine Center) Dr. Stephen Horowitz.
One thing that needed to be settled early on was the credentialing. The Medical Board did not have a problem with board-certified physicians whose practice included complementary modalities-holding them to the same standard of any physician using the most effective safest remedies for their patients (actually per NY State's Alternative Medical Practice Act of 1995). But Beth Israel also created at the time the most comprehensive standards for credentialing practitioners in massage therapy, acupuncture and chiropractic---the last being the first time this had been done in a NYS medical system.
We opened in June 2000. Added to our "Gang of Four" above were the initial core clinician/leadership team of pediatrician Larry Palevsky, MD, Ob-Gyn Allan Warshowsky, MD, Internist Roberta Lee, MD, chiropractor Karen Erickson, DC, acupuncturist and East Asian medicine practitioner Arya Nielsen, PhD, LAc, nutritionist Mary Beth Augustine, RD, holistic Clinical Nurse specialist Aurora Ocampo, RN, CNS (who for five years had led a Nathan Cummings-funded BI holistic nursing initiative that became the progenitor of CHH), Director of Informatics Marsha J. Handel, MLS, business and practice manager Maritza Agostini, and nurse manager Wanda Diaz, RN. At opening we had a beautiful feng shui-designed facility of 12,000 sq ft designed by a leading green architectural firm (also funded by a donor) which was buzzing with our providers' patients -who brought their full practice into CHH, dedicated to creating an extraordinary interprofessional mecca for patient healing services.
There were growing pains, some of which continued in milder forms to this day---mainly in fitting our style of practice into the logistics and regulations of a highly regulated industry. Seemingly large hurdles at times (especially to providers not used to working within such a system), these always turned out to be speed bumps to our functioning.
Early on, CCH became one of the industry leaders. We were at Miraval resort with Bill Sarnoff as a founding member of the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine in 2004. I sat on the initial Executive and Steering and By-laws Committees (with Ben Kligler becoming the Consortium Chairman a few years later). Out of this Consortium and sponsored by the Bravewell Philanthropic Collaborative (which Bill Sarnoff also helped found), CHH was a charter member of the seminal Bravewell Practice-Based Research Network (PBRN). This is a Network of what Bravewell considered to be the nation's top clinical integrative centers of excellence with robust clinical practices (to be a member of the Consortium you have to have all 3 components, but most specialize mainly in research and education in institutions that were not ready to sign off on clinical centers). It took over two years to develop the common electronic language for these centers to share their data to create multi-center trials and outcomes analyses. Recently this practice-based research network moved its headquarters to CHH/BI under the leadership of Dr. Kligler.
In 2004 CHH had one of only two full-time clinical fellowships in integrative medicine in the nation (a BI GME-approved program)-along with our continuing partner in education, Andrew Weil's University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. When the funding for the full-time fellowship finished, Ben Kligler secured enough of our philanthropic and grant funding to keep the post-graduate training program in integrative medicine going until the present time, when it is moving permanently with Ray Teets, MD to Mount Sinai Medical Center.
CHH evolved into the largest and most comprehensive academic integrative center in the nation. It was described by one senior executive at Beth Israel as the "crown jewel" of the system. Mark Hyman, director of the new Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, said CHH was the only model that existed for his team when they started planning their program at CC three years ago. CHH brought in over 5,000 patient visits per month-80% new to the system. It drew families, women and children-and the occasional adult male :) We all felt privileged to be part of such a beautiful, caring and comprehensive healthcare facility.
While the services started out all fee-for-service as is usually necessary for a practice that allows sufficient time to delve into the root cause of patient's myriad problems, we were proud by 2010 the Center had evolved into 70% managed care.
We were fortunate for the first 17 years to have (literally hundreds of) philanthropic backers that supported this new model: raising more than $25 million over its lifetime ($6.5 million by 1999 for start-up, featuring the highest participation rate of BI's trustees in its history). We are forever grateful for the incredibly generous support of countless individual, private foundation and government agency grants (including NIH, NLM and CDC) which allowed us to expand our clinical, research and educational endeavors in the field.
Another special highlight of the Center's outreach was its 3 glorious Galas. These averaged $500,000 each bringing in an average of 500 people, most new to CHH and BIMC. These featured the participation of, among others, Paul Simon, Elvis Costello, Yoko Ono, Sarah McLaughlin, Annie Leibovitz, James Rosenquist, MTV, VH1, and of course, Debauve and Gaillaid chocolatier. One featured an entire room of 500 attendees completely still for a group meditation.
CHH faculty published scores of papers - one of the most important and my favorite being the one funded by Donna Karan's Urban Zen Foundation that showed that providing integrative training and yoga with a concierge on the cancer floor could save up to $1 million in medication costs per year-and this just for pain, anxiety and nausea medications. The study also showed that patients started feeling better before they even entered the hospital---in anticipation of the difference this floor's care would make in their health and well-being.
The Center was an early adopter of functional medicine by its physicians. But it was the interaction of mainstream board-certified physicians, with a large range of highly experienced and qualified non-physician providers, and a well-trained high-on-the-hospitality index support staff communicating directly in one facility with the use of a very sophisticated customizable electronic medical record set up from the outset (Centricity by GE) that provided the backbone for the care. The range of services has included nutrition, acupuncture, chiropractic and osteopathy, indigenous health systems including experts at various periods in Ayurveda, Chinese and Native American medicine, massage therapy, Reiki, aromatherapy, hypnosis, biofeedback and imagery, full-size gym-based physical and occupational therapy, sports training, physiatry, psychology (PhD), psychiatry (MD), psychotherapy (MSW), gynecology, family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics (the nation's largest integrative facility offering this care), women's health, men's health, cardiology, dermatology, and ENT. At its peak the last few years CHH encompassed 40 providers-half MDs half non-MDs, a true blend of interprofessional care.
Integral to CHH was providing high quality information to the community (both professional and consumer) which so often relies on misinformation about integrative healthcare. Our award-winning 1,000+ page website developed and largely written by Director of Informatics Marsha Handel, MLS, provided one of the world's most robust and well-used websites for evidence-based information on integrative healthcare.
All of us who have been involved over the years at CHH can be so very proud of our accomplishment in promoting comprehensive, innovative, interprofessional integrative care in a healing environment, contributing to high quality research in the field, and educating our online and professional community in evidence-based approaches to health and wellness. We helped pave the way for the giant gains in integrative practice and significant shifts in thinking that have transformed the practice of healthcare today. I salute all of you who have given countless hours and energy to making it possible for CHH to achieve all of this.
Benjamin Kligler, MD
Director of Research and Education
What a beautiful and enriching experience we have all shared at the Center for Health and Healing over the past 16 years: the practitioners lucky enough to have worked here, our wonderful staff, our thousands of patients, our learners, our participants in our research studies. With all our challenges, and even now with the closing of this program, the love and care, learning and growing every one of us has brought to this communal home surpass anything I have experienced in my professional life. It has been a healing place for me every single day of those 16 years, and I am so thankful to each and every person who has contributed to that.
Despite the end of this part of our journey together, I am proud and satisfied. We raised hundreds-thousands!--of children together who are growing into strong and healthy adults. We helped each other --practitioners and patients together-- through all kinds of difficult and challenging life transitions. We trained hundreds of healthcare professionals from medicine, nursing, psychology, acupuncture, and many other disciplines in how to practice integrative healthcare together as a team. We built new knowledge though our research program of how to apply the integrative approach to pain, asthma, and depression. And we created a model for integrative practice that the nation and the world have and will continue to learn from - both in our successes and in our failures.
Our coming together in the beautiful healing space we created at this Center is coming to an end. But the love and energy and progress we have all created over this time together only continue to grow and become stronger and more influential in moving our community and our country toward wholeness and real health. Each of us - the boy now going off to college who has known us as his family doctors since he was a baby; the senior with chronic pain who found some comfort at the Center and love and understanding when her husband passed; the mid-career, burned-out physician who found a new reason to love the practice of medicine through our training programs; and even me, off to the Veterans Health Administration with all these gifts of experience and learning I have been given at the Center - will continue in our own way to make the world a more caring, peaceful, and healing place.
Thank you to each and every one of you for the part you played in this community and on this journey we have taken together. I am so proud of where we have been together and what we have created. And I am even prouder when I imagine what new and wonderful changes this powerful community will bring about as we go forward.
Martin Ehrlich, MD
Medical Director
When I came to CHH in April of 2003 it was the fulfillment of a dream to work in a beautiful integrative center together with like-minded physicians, nutritionists, psychotherapists, Traditional East Asian Medicine practitioners, chiropractors, massage therapists, homeopaths, herbalists, aromatherapists and Reiki practitioners. I was so fortunate to work and learn from respected leaders in the field of Integrative Medicine including Ben Kligler, Woodson Merrell, Roberta Lee, Arya Nielsen, Mary Beth Augustine, Karen Erickson, Tina Awad, Marsha Handel, Barbara Glickstein and many others. The ability to work so closely, to share and discuss patients and learn from each other led to vastly improved patient care and great personal and professional satisfaction. When I arrived in 2003 the structure of CHH changed from a primarily consultative, fee for service model to insurance-based primary care. With that change patients came in huge numbers and filled our practices. Over the past 13 years we continued to expand services to include sports medicine, physical therapy, otolaryngology, cardiology, dermatology, meditation and mindfulness-based stress reduction. Over these past thirteen years I have witnessed the growth of Integrative Medicine nationally along the lines of the model developed here at CHH. Integrative Primary care is now the predominant model in academic medical centers around the country. It is sad that the full spectrum of Center activity is closing for our patients and staff. It's ironic because our model fulfills so many of the stated goals of today's health care systems: empowering and educating patients to take a greater role in their care, reducing excessive use of drugs and expensive procedures, keeping people healthy and out of the hospital, improving patient satisfaction and reducing health care costs. Though we are closing at 245 Fifth Avenue, the care we provided for our patients will not be forgotten and the impact we have had on education and research will have lasting influence. Our staff will continue to provide excellent care and contribute, albeit in different settings.
Barbara Glickstein, RN, MPH
Founding Director
 Creating community was one of the core values in the formation and creation of the Center for Health and Healing. Back in the day, (early 1990s), pediatrician Betsy MacGregor founded the Program for Humanistic Health Care at Beth Israel Medical Center. We made flyers (yep and thumb tacked them on bulletin boards) inviting people to monthly brown-bag meet-ups to teach us about the evidence-based modalities they incorporated into their clinical practice -- including therapeutic touch, acupuncture, Reiki, and aromatherapy. As this ground work grew, visionary BIMC trustee, Bill Sarnoff, led the charge to start the Center.
The founding team convened a diverse group of community-based holistic and traditional medicine practitioners, educators and researchers from the region. We met monthly to brainstorm ideas on what this academic integrative health center might look like. The conversations were steeped in wisdom, knowledge, dreams, vision, heart and passion, and at times quite heated.
All these individuals were the life line to the formation and foundation of CHH
We pledged to honor the history of diverse healing traditions practiced globally, to learn from each other and that every person seeking services would be at the center of their health and well-being.
The Center for Health and Healing has supported the health and well being of many newborn babies, children, and adults including our elders. The Center, as part of the national integrative health care movement, has had a significant and longstanding impact on society and in transforming a health care system.
It has helped blur the lines between allopathic medicine and traditional evidence-based healing practices as part of a larger cultural shift in society. Every person who worked here and every child and adult who came for care has contributed to this evolution.
That work is not done.
Roberta Lee, MD, CAc
The closing of the original Center for Health and Healing saddens me greatly. The Center is one of a handful of integrative facilities that existed over fifteen years - so many folded within three years. But thanks to Dr. Woodson Merrell and Bill Sarnoff's efforts we kept our doors open, allowing us to accomplish what I feel was its most notable achievement - educating future integrative practitioners and taking care of patients young and old.
On a personal note I am enormously grateful for the 14 years of Center work. After training with Dr. Weil at the University of Arizona, upon graduation there were really no Integrative centers to come to and CHH was in gestation. It was fortuitous timing running into Woody Merrell and Ben Kligler at the nutrition conference in Seattle and learning of the soon to be opening Center. Literally months later, that meeting resulted in my joining the planning team. It felt like I was joining a new family.
The Center's opening in 2000 was an absolutely magical experience for me. I will always remember with great fondness my good fortune to work with some of the finest integrative practitioners in the country. Like a typical "family experience" it wasn't always easy but the totality of the experience gave me the opportunity to help shape a truly new kind of integrative practice - and I think we achieved a new synthesis of integrative primary care.
I take heart in knowing that we all gave so much of our selves in daring to dream, live, teach and mentor others during those years. It is in this effort of extending ourselves with such totality to manifest this vision that the Center lives on in perpetuity. For all its graduate practitioners, learners, and patients will continue the vision in new ways - perhaps using the memory of that time to begin many new iterations of healing places.
Marsha J. Handel, MLS
Director, Informatics and Online Education
 The Center for Health and Healing helped pioneer the vision of a more inclusive, humanistic and collaborative practice of medicine, putting the patient front and center in the process. The focus on evidence-based clinical practice, research and education gave us an opportunity to contribute on all these fronts - and I like to think we played a role in the flowering of these values and goals in myriad national initiatives in Integrative Healthcare. What an honor to have been part of that vision from the day we opened our doors. The minds and hearts of all those who have been a part of CHH have been quite extraordinary - innovative, caring, open, curious, kind, scientific and dedicated. I think we have all been blessed by this opportunity - I know I have.
Arya Nielsen, PhD
Director, Acupuncture Fellowship for Inpatient Care
This is a note of gratitude.
We facilitated excellent care to our patients and advanced a standard of care to include integrative medicine.
We introduced care options not previously credentialed or offered in the Continuum Health System.
We researched and contributed to the evidence clarifying therapeutic benefit of traditional medical therapies and the value of offering them onsite.
With hospital support we advanced acupuncture therapy and integrative medicine to the Beth Israel inpatient population.
I was able to complete my doctoral research and PhD and mentor others in their quest for a higher degree.
Together the CHH team applied research skills to appeal to the Joint Commission to update their standard on pain to include nonpharmacologic options for pain, which they did.
This is a note of gratitude.
To Bill Sarnoff and Woody Merrell for leading a vision of care that is a national movement. To Ben Kligler for creating a research arm. To Marsha Handel for supporting our evidence-based work. To Barbara Glickstein and Cathy Schaffer for their part in creating the Center and teaching us that change is always a part of it. To every single practitioner and staff person who worked each day to provide excellent care.
Grateful.
Mary Beth Augustine, RDN, CDN, FAND
I've been blessed to provide nutrition care at the Center for Health & Healing since its opening in June 2000. More than a workplace to me, 'the Center' was a gift for me. A gift that enabled me to give back to the individuals who allowed me to share in their care. Who confided in me. Who humbled me. Who amazed me. Who honored me with the permission and privilege to bear witness to their coping, their resilience in the face of illness, their tenaciousness, and their desire to achieve improved, and often optimal, health and healing in body, mind, and spirit. And to do so in collaboration with many treasured colleagues at the Center.
How does one measure a successful career in healthcare? Is it number of individuals served (by my estimate, approximately 16,000)? Is it number of nutrition observers and interns educated and trained (approximately 300)? Is it numbers of research studies participated in, authored publications, or scientific meetings presented at? Nope, that's not it.
It's the child with rheumatoid arthritis and constipation who said, "I can run real fast and do big poopies now!" It's the father with malnutrition and depression whose son said, "Thank you for giving me back my father." It's the woman with infertility who followed up for maternal nutrition, then post-partum nutrition and lactation, and again for infant feeding. It's the brides and grooms who were 'shedding for the wedding'. It's the teens who wanted clearer skin and healthier fit bodies. The elderly who wanted more life in their years than years in their life. It's the individuals with cancer, neurological disease, autoimmune disease, and more who wanted to use food as medicine and believe truly and deeply in the interconnected health of people, food, and land. It's you. That's how I measure my success in my field. IT'S YOU.
Thank YOU for 16 beautiful years.
Esther Sackett, MPA I feel very fortunate to have spent four years at the CHH and to have worked alongside pioneers of the Integrative Medicine field. I was originally taken on as a volunteer, eventually progressing through part-time and full-time positions, and have always been grateful for the opportunities to grow and to lead that were given to me during my time at the Center. I had the pleasure of producing a short video highlighting the CHH for its 10 year anniversary, for which I interacted with and interviewed a wide spectrum of people who had helped shape and been shaped by their involvement with the Center. I have always been struck by the deep passion, compassion, and dedication that was conveyed by the employees of the CHH in that video. While I am saddened to see the CHH disband, I am grateful to have been a part of it.
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