Advancing Integrative Health INTEGRATIVE HEALTH AND MEDICINE
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Learning in K-12 “Be careful chopping that kale!” “Let’s get up and move around.” “How big are the frogs in the creek this year?” “Let’s just breathe for a few minutes.” Follow Our Posts on Whole Health Learning HERE’S THE PROBLEMTremendous efforts are underway by medicine and community health systems to attack the prevalence and causes of obesity and overweight among children and the ill-effects of social determinants of health. Maybe there’s something else too. Can school gardens, mindfulness classes in 3rd grade, learning about the food system, nutrition, nature learning and exercising before tests increase the blue slice of those dismal circles above? WholeHealthED has been created to find out. In June 2018 at our Inaugural Symposium at Georgetown University in Washington, we brought together leading figures in these fields (for the first time) to talk about the potential for embedding curricula of whole health wellness studies into K-12 learning. It was a good start. |
What’s the connection?Advancing the qualities of a new integrative healing approach, technique, or method may appear to be far removed from giving kids time in the school garden, a few minutes of movement or mindfulness, or preparing meals for a senior center down the road. But not by much. For health and wellness professionals and increasingly physicians who are schooled in and apply whole person healthcare every day, a path of whole-health learning will look a lot like the self-care they are counseling adults to adopt to improve their own health; except without the previous decades of lifestyle choices that the adults are urged to unwind. |