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Summary of 2009 CAM Caucus Meeting
Approximately 20 members of the CAM Caucus met on May 12 in San Francisco during the APA Annual Meeting. After brief introductions recent and planned upgrades in the Caucus website were announced (see review of completed and on-going upgrades in the Caucus website). Those present voted to re-name the Caucus to "Caucus on Integrative Psychiatry." I am in contact with our APA liaison and will get back to members re. any issues or obstacles to changing the caucus name.

Two significant initiatives in CAM/integrative mental health care were announced. A strategy planning meeting on integrative mental health care is now under way within the Consortium of Academic Healthcare Centers for Integrative Medicine. Plans are all but finalized for the first U.S. Conference on Integrative Mental Health Care, which will take place in Phoenix, Arizona, March 2010 (see details on both initiatives).

Much time was spent on discussing strategies for obtaining approval of a full committee on CAM and integrative psychiatry. Several offered to lobby within the Assembly to facilitate this process. To this end it was suggested that an action paper endorsing a committee on CAM/integrative psychiatry be drafted, formally endorsed by the Caucus and submitted to the Assembly. This idea is currently under discussion.

We also discussed the importance of obtaining data on cost and cost-competitiveness of CAM or integrative therapies vs. conventional pharmacological treatment. The goal would be to use this information when arguing for the relevance of non-pharmacological treatments in view of real-world constraints on cost and insurance coverage. We also discussed unresolved safety issues associated with pharmacological treatments as the context in which uses of CAM and integrative treatment modalities in mental health care continue to increase. We agreed that future Caucus initiatives should address both  issues.

Please note that if your web browser is turned on when reading the attachment you will find several active links that will help you navigate within the Caucus website, and learn more about the goals of the Consortium and next year's conference on integrative mental health care.