Gaelle Desbordes and Ronald Garcia presenting at Brigham & Women's very first integrative medicine forum

The Martinos Center's Gaelle Desbordes and Ronald Garcia are speaking at the inaugural “Integrative Medicine Research Forum” today, at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Brigham & Women's Hospital.

The Osher Center offers a unique vision of healthcare that combines Western and Eastern medicines to treat the whole patient, adding alternative approaches to conventional ones to fill in gaps in patient care and "enhance the body’s natural ability to heal and to maintain good health." The goal of today's forum is to bring together experts from across Boston to establish dialog, encourage collaboration and generally strengthen the community of integrative medicine researchers, educators and clinicians.

The forum will include a "rapid-fire pitch session"—a minute or less and a single slide—where researchers will compete for a $500 award. Desbordes, an instructor in Radiology at the Martinos Center, will present on "Longitudinal Changes in Brain Structure After Two Different 8-week Meditation Training Programs." Garcia, a visiting associate professor, will speak about "Respiratory-gated Auricular Vagus Nerve Stimulation Modulates Brainstem Activity in Migraine."

Read more about the forum on the Boston Magazine website.