Dear Pre-health Post-bacc Community and Pre-health Community,

This Thursday, Dec 4th, from 7:30-9:00, we'll be hosting a panel discussion on complementary and alternative medicine in Hunter North 1403, and we'd like to invite you all to attend- everyone involved in prehealth, post-baccs and undergraduates alike, is welcome!



These days alternative approaches to health care are becoming increasingly popular.  There are therapeutic yoga classes for cancer patients given at Sloan Kettering, acupuncture treatments for post-surgery recovery at Columbia, and research into herbal teas and extracts is ongoing at universities around the world (for example, the most effective anti-malarial drug to date, artemisinin, comes from an herb used in Chinese traditional medicine).  There's even a branch of the NIH devoted to the study of these treatments: The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Care.



However, these techniques are something that we traditionally learn almost nothing about as pre-meds.  While we often have extensive exposure to MDs, RNs, and EMTs during our volunteer and research activities, we often learn almost nothing about the lives, practices, and paths of acupuncturists, naturopaths, chiropractors and other practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine, even though we will certainly be working along side them in our future careers.  Hopefully we'll remedy this on Thursday night!



We have an excellent line up of speakers who are all practitioners of alternative and complementary medicine, and they will be available to answer our questions about their practices, their relationships with patients, their path into their specific field of healthcare, and more.  It should be a very interesting discussion, and we're all really looking forward to it!



The location is 1403 Hunter North, (I was too late to get the glass cafeteria).  Let me know if you have any questions!


Cheers,
Justin Rice