Mindfulness: Total Immersion? October 18, 2018 by Taylor Walsh At the K-12 McLean School in Potomac, MD outside Washington, DC, mindful qualities define almost every aspect of the school experience, for students, faculty, staff and parents. Mindfulness is a cornerstone of the transformative environment evolving at McLean School. Gratitude, Heartfulness, Empathy, and Positive Thinking are all mindfulness lessons taught in McLean’s classrooms. The continuation and reinforcement of these activities at home provide practice time and skill development for both students and parents. Frankie EngelkingThe McLean School During our June 2018 inaugural WholeHealthED 2018 Symposium, McLean’s director of Wellness Programs, Frankie Engelking described the carefully evolved process the school undertook to bring mindfulness to its community, which has led to national recognition. The program caught the attention of The Atlantic, which routinely covers innovations in education and health, and wrote about the program here. She presented the infographic below, which is available here as a PDF.
Profiles in Whole Health Learning: Teaching the US Food System September 23, 2018 by Taylor Walsh In this interview from our June 2018 WholeHealthED Symposium in Washington, Leo Horrigan of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future describes the development of FoodSpan, a unique curriculum for high school students that examines the extent and complexity of the U.S. food system. More about FoodSpan can be found at Foodspan Learning at the Center for a Livable Future.
The Journey and the Destination June 23, 2018 by Taylor Walsh The WholeHealthED Journey Begins at the Inaugural Symposium: June 15, 2018 Our goal of providing students a competency in health during their years of formal education took an important first step June 15 at Georgetown University, at WholeHealthED 2018, our inaugural symposium for leaders in school wellness programs and healthcare services and programs devoted to improving kids’ health. This gathering was the first opportunity for wellness program developers, advocates and school coordinators to meet and consider the complementary goals and outcomes that their work has been delivering in U.S. elementary and secondary schools, some for many years. Very few have ever had the occasion to meet before. In the words of David Sobel of Antioch University New England, and a long-time leader in nature education for young children: “It was a great opportunity for me to talk to folks outside of the fields I normally operate in.” The symposium agenda was designed in large part to make these introductions. This unprecedented mash-up (as it was called) of wellness program leaders with school-based healthcare professionals and pediatricians created a new kind of conversation among fields that are commitment to improving children’s health. Click HERE for the report on the day and its highlights The symposium was made possible by a generous grant from the Marino Health Foundation of Cambridge, MA which also played an important role in the 2000’s developing integrative medicine and health clinical capabilities that are advancing whole person healthcare in medicine.
RESEARCH: Fitness and the Brain May 1, 2018 by Taylor Walsh If the brains of 70-year olds can be rejuvenated…how important is it for 7 year-olds…and their siblings? (Or anybody else?) A research study led by neuroscientist Arthur Kramer at the University of Illinois in sedentary people ranging from 60-79 showed that after six months those with improved fitness had an increase in brain volume in the frontal and temporal lobes. (From the site: Sparking Life) The major implication: Exercise not only keeps the brain from rotting, but it also reverses the cell deterioration associated with aging. The Center for Cognitive & Brain Health at Northeastern University is another source for current research on this important understanding of brain health and fitness. This study from January 2015 highlights obesity and overweight issues that still plague children. Click the image to link to the report.
Earth Week ends, stay outside kids April 27, 2018 by Taylor Walsh A most compelling vision of Hope for the Future can be seen in the scores of videos circulating YouTube that show kindergarteners from all over the planet cavorting through the woods, tripping through creeks and having their scientist genes stimulated. Here are a few, including the words of educators speaking to the value of spending “class time” outside. Nature’s Classroom – Tennessee Valley Nova Scotia Neroche Forest Schools, England Here is a little test: Count the number of frowns you see on the faces of kids in these videos. (For the Internet’s most compelling attribute — discovery — forest kindergartens are hard to beat.)
A Whole Health Era Unfolding April 27, 2018 by Taylor Walsh “Whole Health Learning” is part of a broad societal response to the intractable presence of overwhelming conditions of ill-health faced across America; conditions that have thus far outrun conventional medicine’s – and society’s — ability to redress them, notably: Obesity, especially in childhood, that sets the population onto the path of chronic illness The debilitating opioid addiction epidemic Pervasive and complex social determinants of health — Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), trauma, poor nutrition, lack of healthcare — that wrack too many American neighborhoods The costs of dealing with these and chronic pain are plundering the reserves of vitality, prosperity and productivity that lie at the core of the American self-assurance, to say nothing of public treasuries. Everyone feels the costs of dealing with these conditions. But medicine and the healthcare professions have started to respond to these circumstances by pushing the boundaries of their own specialty training, by understanding human health in its broadest context, informed by advances in genomics and personalized medicine, and by partnering with the skilled practitioners of once-scorned and derided healing modalities (meditation and acupuncture among them). All of which is leading to a revised view of the patient: from someone with discrete illness or problem to a person-in-full: a “whole person.” Lifestyles This growing view of a patient as a whole person has naturally brought greater emphasis to the importance of true prevention and support for wellbeing. In October 2017, Andrew Weil, MD, for decades one of the nation’s leading advocates for health promotion and prevention, observed during his presentation at the Global Wellness Summit: Andrew Weil MD “To help people make better and not make worse lifestyle choices the first thing I can do is to educate them…. If you can get people information, they can understand and connect with their own experience, and they will move in the right direction.” Weil speaks of the education that he and physician colleagues — through new approaches to lifestyle medicine – provide to their adult patients in order to undo the debilitating effects of years of health-compromising lifestyle. In fact “lifestyle” has become a vibrant corner in medicine for educating conventionally-trained medical professionals with the tools to work with (rather than “treat”) the whole person. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine put it this way: Lifestyle Medicine involves the use of evidence-based lifestyle therapeutic approaches, such as a predominantly whole food, plant-based diet, regular physical activity, adequate sleep, stress management, avoidance of risky substance use, and other non-drug modalities, to prevent, treat, and, oftentimes, reverse the lifestyle-related, chronic disease that’s all too prevalent. Cynics may wonder why this “answer” wasn’t always part of basic doctor training in the first place. The reality is that it just wasn’t. In the years ahead physicians and patients alike are going to face a profusion of whole-health-based care options provided by the adherents of lifestyle, functional, integrative, holistic and naturopathic medicine, chiropractic, and acupuncture and oriental medicine. The new forms of shared, inter-professional team experiences that are in formation now don’t yet constitute a trend, but their orientation to the whole person and the root causes of disease ultimately will change the care culture. Whole Health Care for Kids Closer to elementary schools, and therefore the focus of WholeHealthED, many pediatricians especially have undertaken a more expansive, supportive role for the whole health and wellbeing for their young patients and their families. In this video, Nimali Fernando, MD who serves families in Spotsylvania County, VA, has taken a serious step into whole health learning by demonstrating to her families the foundations for good health that lie in informed food and diet choices. Her clinical practice, Yum Pediatrics now includes a teaching kitchen supported by a nutritionist and the produce of a vegetable garden outside her office. Serving a population in which some 30% of children are overweight or obese, Fernando made a point of providing recipes and nutrition information on her clinic’s web site, which was merely a beginning: “When I started to see how empowering that was to families,” she says, “I decided to teach cooking classes.” Many other examples of such imagination-driven initiatives can be found all across the nation. As their advantages become more widely known and understood, the continued funding by Medicare and Medicaid for improvements in electronic health records and other administrative capacity, will make the choices for directing those funds that much starker. Meanwhile, attending to those discouraging conditions outlined above has clearly taken on an urgency that has inspired innovations like Dr. Fernando’s pediatric teaching kitchen. And as Dr. Weil put it: “If you can get people information, they can understand and connect with their own experience, and they will move in the right direction.” The WholeHealthED variation: Let’s start this information delivery when people are 4 and sustain it until they’re 18.