By Freya Moran

The website is elusive about what happens at LEAPS, and I think for good reason.

Not knowing where the next week would go, I boarded a plane for Oceanside, Calif., the Saturday before finals week. LEAPS was to begin the following day at 4 p.m., and thanks to the Facebook page, I’d made plans to meet up with a student from Texas in Los Angeles and travel together from there. One missed train and a $300 taxi ride later, we arrived in Oceanside at the Old Mission in San Louis Rey at 9 p.m.

The next day, I opened my window to the most beautiful rose gardens and stone archways. The Old Mission is one of the oldest Franciscan monasteries in the country. The grounds have been used to host meditation seminars, rehabilitation programs and weddings, so to say it was one of the calmest, most relaxing places I’ve ever been would be an understatement.

By the time 4 p.m. rolled around, most of the students had already met one another, but our formal introductions took place in the dining hall. There we were sorted into groups of about five or six, introduced to the doctor who would be our mentor and given our first assignment in mindful meal preparation. We were given a book of diet-conscious recipes and each group was responsible for preparing one element of the dinner for our roughly 45-person group. A nutritional specialist coached us on the importance of presence and mindfulness in preparing a meal, as well as eating it. For the first time I had an actual workshop using what I’d learned about clinical nutrition and it gave me real, practical insight in what I would tell my patient with diabetes or hypertension to change their lifestyle.

The mornings at the monastery are spent in total silence until 9 a.m. There’s also no Internet, and cell phone use is restricted to two, one-hour blocks in the afternoon and evening. If the thought of this gives you anxiety, you’re in good company – but by the end of the week, the silence had become welcome and background noise became an insult to the mindfulness of the moment. Every day began with some kind of activity: tai chi, yoga, meditation, journaling and more, which was followed by breakfast provided by the monastery. The bulk of the morning workshops focused on some form of medicine. A speaker or group would come in to lead a short lecture and discussion about their specialty and the rest of the time was spent exploring the technique. Each speaker relayed the evidence and research supporting the use of their technique in practice and how it could be practically applied as an integrative approach. My personal favorite was the acupuncture workshop because, up to that point, I’d never been to an acupuncturist let alone read the literature on it. The speaker graciously used me as her workshop demonstration, and I received a full treatment for stress reduction – in a word, the results were amazing!

Each day at the LEAPS symposium was an exploration into these different disciplines. I experienced lectures in the efficacy of yoga and tai chi in the treatment of various diseases, nutrition counseling, the use of herbology, and the history of osteopathy and a demonstration of their postural assessment and general physical exam. If you thought the psychology of posture was purely a chiropractic topic, then you’d be shocked by what other practitioners are doing with it! There was also a panel discussion led by myself and the four other alternative care practitioners, but more on that later…

The whole program asked nothing of me but to have an open mind and to share my ideas. As someone who has a particular interest in a multidisciplinary approach to patient-centered care, I was exposed to many other styles of health and how to exist among them while maintaining my own philosophy and identity as a chiropractor. The primary care position is a malleable one, with enough freedom (and responsibility) to make it our own.

If you’ve ever had even an itch of interest in the way others practice medicine, then getting involved in the Student Alliance for Integrated Medicine (SAIM) and The Academy of Integrated Medicine (AIHM) are great places to start exploring the vision of integrative medicine. The reason I chose IM was because I discovered early on that even if I didn’t intend to practice in a multidisciplinary environment, my patients would. Knowing how to communicate with understanding and compassion is the key to truly serving your patient.

By: Freya Moran

I heard about LEAPS in an email. I can’t remember who sent it or why, but administration sent out an update on scholarship opportunities near the end of my fifth quarter (just a few weeks before boards) and amongst the messages stuffing my inbox, something caught my eye.

Now, before I get too far into the application process, let me just say how awesome and powerful it is to be a student. Hear me out. Just by showing interest in a particular direction, we can change the course of opportunities for our education and our careers. Yes, the road to change is long and full of paperwork, but as students we rarely see the paperwork – it’s up to us to do the leg-work. In my short time as a student, I’ve seen more progression for chiropractic in the area of integrative medicine than I can even wrap my head around. As the shortage of primary care physicians grows and our treatment skills grow stronger, I see no reason why chiropractic shouldn’t evolve to fill that void. In fact, up to that point, I had been thinking about what the differences actually were between chiropractic care and the typical medical doctor in terms of primary care. The only conclusion I could come up with, besides prescription rights, was residency.

The typical education sequence for an MD/DO student is four years of medical school followed by a residency program. Residency can be anywhere from two years practicing primary care to eight years studying neurosurgery, living only marginally better than the average graduate student with a tiny stipend after years of maintaining a GPA in order to “match” with a program you want. These programs are meant to aid students in achieving clinical experience in specialized fields, so by the time they matriculate they are literally the most educated, qualified individuals they can be.

Currently, there is residency program for chiropractic students in radiology, a similar placement in the VA and a fellowship in sports medicine. Beyond that, not much post-graduate training exists beyond continuing education seminars and preceptorship. What would it mean to integrate chiropractic medicine with traditional allopathic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, physical therapy, naturopathic medicine, functional nutrition, acupuncture, etc.?

And there in my inbox was an email for the Leadership and Education Program for Students in Integrative Medicine (LEAPS into IM) annual leadership program. I knew nothing about it, but after reading the short synopsis I learned the program was hosted by the American Consortium for Integrative Medicine in association with the American Medical Student Association. These two governing bodies have never been typically associated with recognizing chiropractic. After a little snooping around on their website, I found the application to be straightforward. It required participants to plan and execute a proposed idea with support from faculty mentors and a core faculty at LEAPS within a year. If the student and their idea were chosen, the consortium would give small monetary grants to help get the project off the ground. Only 30 medical students around the country were to be picked!

As this was the first time the consortium had embraced complementary alternative medical providers, and given my intense passion for integrating medicine, I proposed the project of my dreams: an integrative medicine residency program that would be open to chiropractic students as well as other CAM and allopathic providers.

Although this kind of project is most likely going to be my life’s work rather than something I can accomplish in the next year, it was this idea that grabbed the interest of the coordinator and director of the leadership program and solidified my spot as the first chiropractic student accepted into LEAPS into IM.

Coming Soon! Read about Freya’s experience at the week-long Leaps into IM project in Oceanside, Calif.!