Residential Healthcare Group was a proud sponsor of the fourth Care Continuum Conference of Metro Detroit (C3MD), which hosted a capacity crowd of local healthcare leaders, physicians, clinicians, and passionate advocates of mind body medicine. Held at The Townsend Hotel, C3MD 2016 brought an important topic to light: ‘Mind, Body, Medicine, and the Bottom Line.’ The featured guest speakers were Dr. Darshan Mehta, MD, and Dr. Zubin Damania, MD, also known as ZDoggMD. Each presenation is both thought provooking and inspiring. We’ve hope you enjoy them in their entirety below.
As Medical Director of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Director of Education for the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dr. Mehta devotes his practice and research interests to mind body medicine. He was an author of the groundbreaking 2015 study demonstrating that patients who engaged in mind body interventions (such as yoga, deep breathing, and prayer) reduced their annual healthcare utilization by about 40%. In his presentation, Dr. Mehta educated the crowd on methods for handling stress and the search for the ‘right’ life balance. Studies have found that 60% to 90% of healthcare visits are stress related, so Dr. Mehta created his very own Stress Testing Card. He encouraged attendees to take a card to help identify when they are stressed and apply well-known techniques for stress reduction and relaxation.
Dr. Damania next took the stage, immediately infusing the crowd with jokes as part of his informative take on the mind’s influence on physical health. A former hospitalist at Stanford and an internist and founder of Turntable Health, Dr. Damania has had parallel successes in his shadow career performing stand-up comedy for medical audiences, as well as creating parody music videos about healthcare topics under the pseudonym ZDoggMD. He stated, ‘Tremendous work has been going on in terms of understanding everything from the placebo effect to studying the ways that meditation, yoga, tai chi, controlled breathing, etc. can affect health utilization. Could we have non-pharmacologic approaches to managing stress, pain, and other afflictions?’ At the close of his presentation, the crowd burst into a cheerful uproar for the world premiere of the newest ZDoggMD music video, ‘Hippies’ (a parody of the Twenty One Pilots song ‘Heathens’).
Thanks to the combined efforts of the conference sponsors and partners, C3MD 2016 boasted the conference’s highest attendance to date and brought awareness to local organizations like Yoga Moves MS and the Michigan Collaborative for Mindfulness in Education (MC4ME). Mario Nanos, Vice President of Sales at Residential Home Health and member of the ‘Michigan Mind Body Team’ responsible for the event, called C3MD 2016 ‘amazing! Dr. Mehta and ZDogg worked extraordinarily well together, and we were able to spread the message to a lot of healthcare professionals.’ He noted that not only are the two conference speakers already making plans to collaborate on future endeavors, but also the Michigan Mind Body Team has been fielding questions about incorporating mind body practice into patient care, achieving the conference’s aim ‘to spread the mind body message in Michigan.’
