By Victor S. Sierpina, MD, WD and Laura Nell Nicholson Professor of Integrative Medicine, Professor of Family Medicine at UTMB-Health and the John Sealy School of Medicine.   “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” –Mary Oliver   Ask not “What is the matter with you?” Ask instead, “What matters to you?” This is a guiding mantra for the Veteran’s Administration Whole Health Program.   Practices such as acupuncture, yoga, massage, tai chi, clinical hypnosis,...

BY Oyetokunbo Ibidapo-Obe, M.D., Assistant Professor of Family Medicine, Women’s Specialist, UTMB-Health Integrative medicine approaches health in multiple ways, including mainstream-conventional medicine and several complementary and alternative approaches to positively impact well-being. Several types of complementary modalities are used in cancer care. This article will focus on breast cancer survivorship and the integrated approach to breast cancer care. Breast cancer, like any other cancer, is a life-changing diagnosis with an impact on every aspect of...

By Victor S. Sierpina, MD, ABFM, ABIHM, WD and Laura Nell Nicholson Family Professor of Integrative Medicine Director, Medical Student Education Medical Director, Island West Family Medicine Clinic University of Texas Distinguished Teaching Professor   “Our equanimity is chiefly exercised in enabling us to bear with composure the misfortunes of our neighbors.” – William Osler   My Tuesday morning acupuncture clinic is busier than ever. Medicare has in the past couple of years started paying...

By Sagar Kamprath, MD, Assistant Professor of Family Medicine, University of Texas Medical Branch In a world with so many stressors and decreasing resources, we are left often wondering what to do when faced with further seemingly insurmountable news.  For some patients and family members, that news comes as one word: cancer.  Advances in the field of medicine allow our patients to survive much longer with targeted treatment options including immunotherapy, biologic treatments, chemotherapy, radiation,...

By Victor S. Sierpina, MD The mark of the educated man is not in his boast that he has built his mountain of facts and stood on the top of it, but in his admission that there may be other peaks in the same range with men on the top of them, and that, though their views of the landscape may be different from his, they are nonetheless legitimate. -E.J. Pratt, poet Meditation is one...

By Victor S. Sierpina, MD With 36 states having legalized medical marijuana and 18 allowing it for recreational use, we hear precious little on data for its benefits and harms. We also don’t see any reports of massive upticks in marijuana addiction, overdoses, deaths, except for some cases of cannabis hyperemesis syndrome and reports of impaired driving. A recent article in The American Family Physician, “Cannabis Essentials: Tools for Clinical Practice” delves into the clinical...

By Victor S. Sierpina, MD Prime health concerns of patients as they age are the 3-D’s: dependence, disability, dementia. No one wants to be in a situation where they are totally dependent on their family or others, disabled from normal activities of daily living, or worst of all, demented with Alzheimer’s or another cognitive problem. These are deep and very real concerns of so many patients I have treated over the years. Preventing or slowing...

By Victor S. Sierpina, MD “Do or do not. There is no try.” -Yoda If there were a pill as good as physical activity, it would be a blockbuster. We have long known the benefits of exercise, as little as 150 minutes a week, on improving risk and outcomes of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and even cancer. Now, we can add our new buddy COVID-19 to the list. In a study...

By Jaysonn Vel, MS3, UTMB and Samuel Mathis, M.D., UTMB Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) is an increasingly common intestinal condition characterized by a relapsing and remitting course of abdominal pain with a change in bowel habits. It affects millions of individuals and has severe effects on quality of life with an increase in morbidity and risk of colorectal cancer. There are two variants of IBD that are defined according to location and depth of intestinal...

BY Victor S. Sierpina, MD, ABFM, ABIHM, WD and Laura Nell Nicholson Family Professor of Integrative Medicine Director, Medical Student Education Medical Director, Island West Family Medicine Clinic University of Texas Distinguished Teaching Professor Are integrative medicine approaches useful to the management of post-COVID syndrome? This is an evolving space of clinical and pre-clinical science, so no definitive consensus, adequate randomized trials, or meta-analyses are yet available to answer this question. However, at this stage...