Professor Sir Sam Everington, GP, Chair of the Tower Hamlets Clinical Commissioning Group, Vice Chair of The College of Medicine & pioneer of Integrative Medicine

 

Medicine, as we know it, is no longer affordable or sustainable. Nor is it able to curb the increase in obesity, mental health problems and most long-term disease. Dr Michael Dixon, Chair of the College of Medicine, will highlight how it is now time for Integrative Care to take centre stage - combining the best of our current medicine with an approach that enhances our natural abilities to self-heal and stay healthy using lifestyle and a wider range of therapies.

Dr Victoria Maizes - Executive Director of the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, chief of the UA Division of Integrative Medicine and a professor of medicine, family medicine and public health highlights her journey in Integrative Medicine and demonstrates how integrative medicine is helping to reverse chronic disease.

This session will focus on how social prescribing can have a positive role alongside deprescribing in helping patients withdraw safely from dependence forming drugs, and explore how they could form an integrated approach to prevent and treat prescribed drug dependence.

Danny Kruger MP, Chair, All Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence;  Professor Tony Avery, National Clinical Director for Prescribing;  Lelly Oboh Consultant Pharmacist, Guys and St Thomas NHS Trust Community Health Services; Dr Bogdan Chiva-Giurca Royal Surrey County Hospital and  founder NHS Social Prescribing Champion Scheme; Sean Jennings, Patient who has created pain cafes throughout Primary Care Networks in Cornwall; Gay Palmer, Social Prescriber Link Worker Team Lead, South Southwark Primary Care Network    

 

In conversation with Dr Elizabeth Thompson, Dr Reena Kotecha and Ellie Grace will highlight how they use integrative medicine to support  the wellbeing of clinicians.  Dr Reena Kotecha is the founder for Mindful Medics, a self Care programme, which she delivers to clinical and non-clinical staff in healthcare settings across the globe.  Ellie Grace uses yoga as a tool for social change and is a specialist in trauma-informed yoga which she has used to support both NHS doctors and medical students at Queen Mary University.

James Maskell is advocating that facilitating group visits is the most powerful force to transform healthcare and is the solution to the biggest challenges facing healthcare: chronic disease, escalating costs, physician shortages, care access and affordability, physician burnout, loneliness, and mental health.  As the founder of the Functional Forum, James has spent the past decade at the cross section of functional medicine and community and recognises that to democratise health we must put community and group visits so everyone can experience the benefits of integrative medicine.

Jenny Seagrove has a lifelong interest in herbal medicine, minerals and vitamins and lifestyle choices.  Daily multivitamin and mineral supplements have been a central component in both her professional and personal life.  Jenny believes there are alternative ways to maintaining good health and will be discussing with Harry Brünjes her conviction to prevention of ill health rather than just cure.

Simon Mills, who has been in herbal practice since 1977 and is at the forefront of modern development of herbal, complementary and integrative medicine, will highlight the role that herbal medicine can play in addressing  the way we prescribe and use antibiotics so that we can avoid anti-microbial resistance.

Emerging evidence, research and experts characterize the Perimenopause lifestage as inflammatory and immunologically unstable. This presentation puts forward that evidence and findings, and discusses solutions and a functional approach using nutrition, diet, botanicals and nutrients to prevent neurodegeneration, dysfunctional immunomodulation and cardiac-metabolic issues.

Dr Merlin Willcox, a GP and researcher at the University of Southampton, will discuss the therapeutic effects of herbal medicine for Diabetes control.

Sandra Greenbank is an experienced nutritionist with 12 years of experience in supporting couples looking to have a family. This includes taking an in-depth look at their genetics, saliva, blood and urine testing, health history, mindset, hormones, and environment to then develop personalised diet and lifestyle plans.

Dr Sally Moorcroft will discuss key herbal actions from adaptogens, anti-inflammatories and antimicrobials to nootrophics. Demonstrating with cases from her 20 years of clinical experience how they can successfully reduce prescription medication use in many areas - from minor infections, insomnia, pain, inflammation and anxiety to more complex chronic conditions. Taking a deep dive into the research to support their use, and some of the key phytonutrients this session will also look at practical and simple ways to safely introduce herbal medicine into an IM clinical practice.

Dr. Nasha Winters will share her decades of research and personal experience on how to prevent cancer.  Her approach is to look at the terrain which includes focusing on epigenetics, the microbiome, the immune system, toxin exposures, and blood sugar balance and how neglect via nourishment, physical stress and psychological stress are all important components of an anti-cancer living plan.

Dr Ayan Panja shares the experience of his own illness, how he developed a novel framework, and ways to elegantly incorporate a systems medicine approach into NHS GP consultations. The framework helps patients understand the impact of their own timeline and lifestyle on their health. By helping them lay out their story, Ayan’s method allows primary care teams to empower patients to generate a targeted “lifestyle prescription”, which, with the help of behaviour change and cognitive techniques, allows the patient to create and stick to their personalised plans successfully. 

Jo will be using her decades of clinical application in the field of integrative oncology to bring to you the importance and added value of utilising functional medicine and conventional oncology side by side.

Working in the NHS and struggling to enact a vision of whole person healthcare, Doctor Thompson will describe her personal and organisational journey of overcoming barriers to transformational change and describe putting into practice models of integrative medicine training, community building and the delivery of clinical services. She will discuss the possibility of change through working with communities of like-minded people to create health and well-being and take the pressure of frontline services in burnout.

Dr Nina Fuller-Shavel and Dr Deepak Ravindran will discuss how integrative oncology (IO) approaches can transform support for those living with advanced and metastatic cancer, shifting from pure symptom management to optimising whole person resilience, minimising side effects of ongoing treatment and promoting better quality of life at any stage.

How are you sleeping?  Dr Ashish Bhatia asks because your sleep is precious. Humble sleep is so named because it is often overlooked, yet it has profound implications for the health and performance of individuals and society. Dr Bhatia has been facilitating sleep groups free of charge in his GP practice and the results have been transformative.  Having trained in CBT for insomnia he has evolved a number of resources including a new simple sleep tool designed to help clinicians screen, score, sort and support people improve their sleep, differentiating sleep issues ( like insomnia, parasomnias, OSA, PLMD and more) and signpost them to further care if needed.  

 

Dr Penny Kechagioglou is a Consultant Clinical Oncologist and a qualified Functional Medicine Coach and will share her experience of the tremendous benefits that health coaching has had with her own patients.  Together with Izabella Natrins, the CEO of the UK International Health Coaching Association they will also demonstrate the role that health coaches can play in matching clinical resources with the growing demands of patients’ need for specialist care and provide anti-cancer lifestyle programmes at scale.

            The team behind ENO Breathe will share insights into this innovative breathing and wellbeing programme for people recovering from COVID-19, who are still suffering with breathlessness and associated anxiety.

Prof Eran Segal heads up the Human Phenotype Project, a large scale (more than 10,000 participants) deep-phenotype prospective longitudinal cohort and biobank that is developing prediction models for disease onset and progression.  Utilising medical history, lifestyle and nutritional habits, vital signs, anthropometrics, blood tests, continuous glucose and sleep monitoring, and molecular profiling of the transcriptome, genetics, gut and oral microbiome, metabolome and immune system; the predictive models developed can be translated into personalized disease prevention and treatment plans.

Dr Robert Lustig is Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics at UCSF, and the New York Times bestselling author  will elaborate the similarities between metabolic health and mental health, and highlight how changes in our environment over the last 50 years have altered our biochemistry to foment the twin pandemics of chronic metabolic disease and psychiatric disease.