With a strong voice on a national stage with SIO, Helen sees tremendous opportunities to educate both patients and medical professionals, provide needed leadership, and secure the necessary funding to accomplish the Foundation’s goals. SIO will also create avenues for discovering other research at medical centers around the country.

At the last SIO Conference, major medical centers discussed in more detail how they use integrative medicine to treat specific types of cancer. It is crucial that decision makers at medical centers send their medical professionals and actually join the SIO as an institution to make the SIO stronger. This will allow hospitals or medical schools to offer constructive critiques of SIO’s work, helping to strengthen its reach and impact.

NATIONAL ACADEMY OF MEDICINE

The federal government is also focused on integrative medicine, holding the first conference on the subject in February 2009 in Washington. The National Academy of Medicine will announce federal guidelines for integrative medicine (including integrative oncology) to the medical community. The current abstracts indicate a new comprehensive direction in health care, which includes preventative medicine.

You can read these abstracts at the following address: http://www.iom.edu/CMS/28312/52555/62252/62351/62353.aspx. Two of the authors who were commissioned to write abstracts were sponsored by the Foundation to speak in Cleveland even before the founding of the Society for Integrative Oncology. Helen and Jim Moss will attend this conference.

NEXT STEPS

Helen and The Helen Moss Breast Cancer Research Foundation will work with leaders at hospitals throughout Northeast Ohio to educate and inform them about the benefits of integrative oncology, integrative medicine, and preventative medicine. Patients deserve the best individual treatments available to them – treatments that take into account the whole patient and his or her holistic needs. It is up to the medical professionals to appreciate, understand, and apply the best methods available to patients. Helen and her Foundation are committed to advocating for these changes through research and education.