williamaveryhudson

An AP story summarizes some key points about corporate social responsibility:

“Companies that work to improve health and education overseas also can improve their images in foreign countries and among consumers at home. They can reap benefits to employee morale and recruiting. And they can lay the groundwork in future markets.”

Procter & Gamble’s Children’s Safe-Drinking Water program employs a modest commercial business model to distribute water purification kits where they are most needed - places like Kenya, Haiti, Uganda, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. A packet of PUR, which treats about three gallons of water, costs about 3.5 cents to produce, and is sold to end users for about 10 cents. The difference goes to non-government partners, commercial wholesalers, and individual vendors.

Population Services International, P&G’s nonprofit partner in the venture, sees mission-related advantages in using the commercial sector to achieve its goals, noting that such business approaches can sometimes be more effective than simple donations in actually getting the job done.

One note: From a quick look at their websites, P&G and PSI don’t seem say that end users have to purchase the water purification packets, and at a markup (roughtly 150% by my arithmetic). I posted a comment at Action Without Borders, where I saw the story.

tags: corporate social responsibility

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
- Philip K. Dick

tags: science fiction

When creating partnerships with industry, nonprofits should focus on “companies that have the resources to help solve the problem,” not just those that cause problems. “Seek business partners, not villians” is just one pointer from “Changing the Game,” in the current Stanford Social Innovation Review. Others include asking for more than money, and sharing the credit for positive change.

On the other side, businesses can practive authentic corporate social responsibility by picking the right issues, establishing concrete goals, deploying key assets to the cause, and reporting progess.

tags: corporate social responsibility

CAM EXPO EAST – DAY 3 (5 MARCH 2006)

• Placebo research provides another evidence base for healing – the physiological/psychological effects of meaning in treatment of disease.
• The term “placebo” is commonly used to describe an inert compound or sham procedure used in clinical trials trials. However, a placebo effect may also reflect a response to the meaning or the context of the supposedly inactive therapy.
• Placebo response, better referred to as meaning response or context response, can be the most interesting part of the study.
• Meaning is the largest component of the healing process.
• Yoga is the best tool that I know of for helping myself and for helping other people show up in the moment and for getting connected to the breath, and inhabit their bodies, which is really the first step in being able to heal.
• Yoga is actually functional medicine – it improves the functioning of the organs. It probably improves the functioning of all the organs.
• If people are depressed, you can put them in a supported pose to open up their chest and they’ll feel much better. If people are anxious, you can give them poses to help anxiety. If people are tired, you can give them poses that give them energy. Yoga is such a sophisticated system beyond the physical exercise, it should be a part of any treatment program.

Day 3 Presenters (partial list)
Mark Hyman, MD (Hyman Integrative Therapies)
Wayne Jonas, MD (The Samueli Institute for Information Biology)
Cyndi Lee (OM Yoga)
Frank Lipman, MD (Eleven Eleven Wellness Center)
Linda Sparrowe, MA, RYT (Alternative Medicine Magazine)

For new posts about free-access, peer-reviewed articles reviewing complementary medicine theory, practice and policy, visit my new blog CAMWATCH.

tags: complementary and alternative medicine integrative medicine health and wellness

CAM EXPO EAST – DAY 2 (4 MARCH 2006)

• We are finding a way to create health, rather than just treating disease. Most people don’t even know how bad they feel. Conversely, most people also don’t know what health feels like.
• Disease is a vehicle to understand physiology. (Buddha’s parable of the boat.)
• The causes of chronic illness – a web of lifestyle and environment.
• What are the fundamental principles that underlie health and disease?
• The simplicity of biology:
  1. What are the raw materials needed? Food, nutrients, H2O, air, light, sleep, movement, love, community… ADD THEM
  2. What are the impediments or injurious factors? SNPs, toxins, allergens, etc… REMOVE THEM
• What is the right medicine for this particular person at this particular moment? Match the therapy to the underlying physiological imbalance.
• We can’t use traditional research tools to investigate complementary and alternative medicine; the subtle changes effected by these therapies will need other measures. But then, modern medical science still doesn’t know how anesthesia works.
• Quality of life and functional improvement both are valid health outcomes. Complementary and alternative medicine, and conventional allopathic medicine, each can provide or the other, or both, or none. As in a Venn diagram.
• Yoga (chair yoga) after heart surgery helps to start deep breathing and gain flexibility – both of which are critical to recovery. It is also an inexpensive therapy.
• The food bolus going through the bowel is a drug as potent as any you will ever take.
• Westerners have lost one of humanity’s major feelings – hunger. We eat by time.
• One third of American children who were born in the year 2000 will become diabetic. Unless a change is made, they will be the first generation in American history to have a lower life expectancy than their parents’ generation.
• “Panic attacks” in women are often due to mitrial valve prolapse – 1 of 7 women in the U.S. have it.
• An important medicosocial lesson: If someone cuts you off in traffic, allow anger (eg, curse them out to yourself); fight hostility (eg, wish them dead). With hostility, you feel no longer a part of humanity. As it turns out, you are also make yourself more susceptible to heart disease.
• In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the goal is to promote health and prevent disease. Curative also, but often, if you get ill the doctor will pay you to come in for treatment. Or you lose confidence and move on to another practitioner.
• Body, mind, spirit, nature are connected by energy as interconnected levels of healing.
• Acupuncture is not just the needle, but who holds the needle. The energy behind the needle.
• The body has thousands of years of wisdom. The mind has the knowledge of one lifetime.
• A useful meditation: Assume a relaxed, smiling face (just a little smile). Send that feeling through your neck, your body, into your organs, into your disease.

Day 2 Presenters (partial list)
Effie Poy Yew Chow, PhD, RN, Lac, Dipl AC (NCCAOM) (East West Academy of Healing Arts)
Mark Hyman, MD (Hyman Integrative Therapies)
Nan Lu, OMD, MD, Lac (Traditional Chinese Medicine World Foundation)
Mehmet Oz, MD, FACS (Columbia University)

tags: complementary and alternative medicine integrative medicine health and wellness

Note: For the next three days, I’ll be posting nearly random notes from the International Complementary and Natural Healthcare Conference and Expo (CAM Expo) East, at New York’s Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square. In fairness to the presenters (some of whom are listed at the bottom of the postings), I’ll publish my notes in the aggregate. With luck, I can follow up with individual reports.

CAM EXPO EAST – DAY 1 (3 MARCH 2006)

• In the integrative medicine model, the physician and patient enter into a partnership with a common goal of optimal wellness. The physician often acts as an educator.
• Although it is important to understand the mechanism of action of all remedies, be aware that it is only recently that conventional pharmaceuticals have been required to establish mechanism of action for approval.
• Integrative medicine centers in academic medical settings are hanging on by a shoestring, financially. Philanthropy is a key area of support. Note philanthropic efforts such as the Bravewell Collaborative .
• Reports from large studies should be read carefully. For example, in the recently publicized low-fat diet component of the Women’s Health Initiative, fewer than 20 percent of the women in the study adhered to the low-fat diet through the entire seven-year study. Yet their outcomes were combined with the more than 80 percent of women who didn’t adhere to the diet for the entire study. The minority who adhered to the diet had dramatically better outcomes.
• According to a study published this year in Health Affairs, 20 percent of America’s gross domestic product (GDP) will be in healthcare. Healthcare costs are actually growing faster than the GDP. And the problem isn’t limited to the U.S. China, for example, is also facing tremendous growth in healthcare costs.
• Integrative medicine requires time. Conventional reimbursement models can kill integrative medicine clinics.
• Everybody will be affected by the changing finances of healthcare in coming years. Healthcare Savings Accounts (HSAs) will be used more and more by the middle class to pay for healthcare – conventional and integrative.
• As people begin to spend more of their own money, they will look at providers completely differently.
• To effect healthcare reform, it is imperative first to get rid of useless tests, procedures, pharmaceuticals etc.
• The power of healthcare should shift from specialists to primary care physicians.
• How to provide care to those who cannot pay is a separate issue that must be confronted.
• Functional medicine is a science-based healthcare approach that assesses and treats underlying causes of illness through individually tailored therapies to restore health and improve function. A cardinal point of functional medicine is to know the patient who has the disease.
• Genetic variation is the leading edge of medicine. Genes are not in a locked case. They are modified with every breath we take, every food we eat.

Day 1 Presenters (partial list)
Sam Benjamin, MD (Humana, Inc)
Joel Evans, MD (The Center for Women’s Health)
Mark Hyman, MD (Hyman Integrative Therapies)
Woodson Merrell, MD (The Continuum Center for Health and Healing)
David Perlmutter, MD (Perlmutter Health Center)

tags: complementary and alternative medicine integrative medicine health and wellness

Working Today/Freelancers Union reports that New York City risks losing its preeminence as a creative capital. Despite the city’s funding for the arts and cultural institutions, individual artists face “financial instability generated by an outdated social safety net, erratic employment, and low incomes.”

Inadequate or nonexistent medical insurance, low incomes, high costs of living and performance/working space in New York make other cities with lower costs and developing creative centers more attractive to creative workers. According to the 2006 report, “While New York remains a preeminent creative capital, growth in its creative workforce has slowed in recent years. In other cities, espcially those with comprehensive cultural development in place, such growth has soared.”

tags: new york creative class

In The Christian Science Monitor, Gregory Lamb profiles Architecture for Humanity and its founder, Cameron Sinclair.

Sinclair and his group work with communities around the world to devise low-cost design solutions to reduce human suffering. Architecture for Humanity doesn’t reveal locations of their structures to film crews and doesn’t mark the buildings with plaques. Sinclair praises nonviolent works of the US military (”the largest humanitarian group in the world”) and even has words of encouragement for FEMA (”they have no resources, and they’re really struggling”).

Sinclair is this year’s recipient of the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) prize, awarded to people who have shown they can change the world.

tags: architecture