Marc Micozzi is a medical physician and anthropologist who was the founding editor-in-chief of the first scholarly journal in the field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine: Research on Paradigm, Practice and Policy. He organized and edited the first U.S. textbook in the field, Fundamentals of Complementary & Alternative Medicine (1996), now entering a fourth edition (2010), with Elsevier Health Sciences. It has been translated into Spanish and Japanese. He served as series editor for Medical Guides to Complementary and Medicine, with 22 titles in print on a broad range of therapies and therapeutic systems within the scope of CAM.
With Springer, he has published texts on Complementary Medicine in Cancer Care & Prevention and on The Practice of Integrative Medicine: A Legal and Operational Guide (with colleagues at Harvard). His latest book in preparation is Textbook of Nutrition. Dr. Micozzi organized and chaired several continuing education conferences on the theory, science and practice of CAM between 1991-2001, co-chaired with former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, and with Dean Ornish, MD.
Prior to this work, Dr. Micozzi published original research on diet, nutrition and chronic disease as a Senior Investigator at the National Cancer Institute from 1984-86. He continued this line of research when he was appointed Associate Director of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and Director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in 1986. His early work on carotenoids (including lycopene), iron and cancer (collaborating with Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg) and other research made important contributions to this field. He co-edited two comprehensive technical volumes on application of clinical trials methods to new investigations of the role of micronutrients and macronutrients in cancer. He has published 275 articles in the medical, scientific and technical literature.
From 2002-2005, he founded the Policy Institute for Integrative Medicine in Bethesda, MD, and served as Executive Director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Dr. Micozzi has actively collaborated with Former US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop for over 25 years, most recently as a medical and scientific advisor to Dr. Koop Life Care Corporation, where he worked on new developments with the FDA regarding review of dietary supplements.
Dr. Micozzi has been a frequent speaker on these topics nationally and internationally. His work has been noted in the New York Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, as well as Good Morning America, CBS Evening News, CNN, C-SPAN, NPR). He is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown University, and a faculty member for the new CAM curriculum at Drexel University in Philadelphia and the University of California-Irvine. He guest lectures at Johns Hopkins University and widely in university courses that use his basic texts.
Dr. Micozzi is a member of the Health Insights Today editorial advisory board. The interviewer, Dr. Daniel Redwood, wrote the chapter on chiropractic for Dr. Micozzi’s textbook, Fundamentals of Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
Fundamentals of Complementary and Alternative Medicine was the first textbook in the field to be published by a major health sciences publisher, in 1995. Your fourth edition has just been released. What can you tell us about it?
I’ve always had the approach of looking at the cultural history of these practices, to explore their foundations. That’s the whole orientation of my textbook. I wanted this to be more than a cookbook. It’s much more fundamental, as you know, as a long time contributor. My goal is to teach students and practitioners how to think about health and healing in a more comprehensive way, trying to prepare them for the 21st century, to live in a post-biomedical paradigm. |
