Overview of our Center
Integrative Medicine combines modern medicine with established practices from around the world. By joining modern medicine with proven practices from other healing traditions, integrative practitioners are better able to relieve suffering, reduce stress, and maintain the well-being of their patients.
UCSF and Integrative Medicine
Established in 1864, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a world-renowned center of science, scholarship, and health care, with 4,000 graduate students, 1,000 postdoctoral fellows, and 15,200 faculty and staff, including an internationally acclaimed team of scientists and physicians. From the discovery of cancer-causing oncogenes, to the first successful fetal surgery, to the revolutionary cloning of DNA, UCSF has earned a reputation of the highest caliber for excellence in research, teaching, and patient care.
In 1997, under the visionary leadership of Dean Haile Debas and support from the Bernard Osher Foundation, UCSF established the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.
The Osher Center is the premiere place where integrative medicine comes together on three important levels: research, education, and patient care. To date, the Center has received two Center of Excellence Awards from the National Institute of Health; developed twenty-five hours of required curricula for medical, nursing and pharmacological students, and seen over twenty thousand patient visits.
The UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine is working to transform health care by:
- Conducting rigorous research on complementary and alternative healing practices;
- Educating medical students, health professionals and the public about these practices; and
- Creating new integrative models of clinical care that combine modern medicine and established healing practices emphasizing prevention, patient empowerment and whole person healing.
Whether translating science into hope or discovery into care, UCSF is advancing health worldwide through activism, education, scholarship and research. A healthier future requires us to challenge preconceptions and biases about practicing good medicine.
Why is this Important?
Healthcare today has been reduced to disease care:
Doctors spend most of their time working on a specific disease or body part with little or no focus on the whole person—which is what we need not only to cure disease, but to also maintain our health and live as fully as possible.
The healthcare crisis is curable:
The economic impact of the most common preventable chronic disease is estimated to be more than $1 trillion and could balloon to nearly 6 trillion by mid-century. That has to change and the time is now.
The potential impact is great:
At the UCSF Osher Center, our treatments are not an adjunct to conventional medicine; rather they are integrated together with a focus on prevention, health maintenance, early intervention and patient-centered care. We take this approach at the UCSF Osher Center and with our sister centers at Harvard and Karolinska. Integrative medicine holds the power to improve public health and reduce care-related costs for our nation and beyond—ensuring a better health care future for all.
