The College of Medicine (CoM) is a United Kingdom based organisation founded in 2010 for healthcare professionals and those interested in an approach to healthcare which includes food, social factors (in partnership with the University of Westminster and Wellcome Trust) and integrated healthcare alongside medicines. It describes its mission as follows: "We advocate for a new attitude to healthcare: one which forges partnerships across society, emphasises prevention, good food, exercise, and attention to the emotional as well as the physical."
Contents
- Officers and Directors
- Membership
- Links to the Princes Foundation for Integrated Health
- Activities
- References
The organisation originated from the collapse of the Prince of Wales' controversial Foundation for Integrated Health, which was criticised widely for promoting alternative medicine.
Officers and Directors
Its officers and associates include current and former senior NHS staff. Its current Vice Presidents are Sir Muir Gray, currently Chief Knowledge Officer of the NHS, Duncan Selbie, who is also Chief Executive of Public Health England and Harry Brünjes, founder of the Premier Medical Group. Its first President was Graeme Catto, former President of the General Medical Council.
Its Director is Michael Dixon.
Membership
The College is a membership organisation open to all, with particular focus on events for healthcare professionals interested in integrated medicine.
Links to the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health
One director of the College, Michael Dixon, is a former director of the Foundation for Integrated Health. A former director of the College, George Lewith, was a council member of the foundation and his research unit at the University of Southampton played an important role in the development of the foundation.
The Foundation for Integrated Health promoted alternative medicine under the guise of "integrative medicine" and closed down in 2010 after and accounding fraud.
When the College of Medicine was launched, several commentators writing in the Guardian and the British Medical Journal, expressed the opinion that the new organisation was simply a re-branding of the Prince's Foundation, some describing it as "Hamlet without the Prince".
Alternative medicine critic and pharmacologist David Colquhoun has argued that the College (originally called "The College of Integrated Health") is extremely well-funded and seemed from the beginning to be very confident of the Prince's support, explicitly describing its mission as "to take forward the vision of HRH the Prince of Wales" in an early presentation.
The College responded to this initial criticism by stating that it aims were to "promote a more politically and professionally transparent, patient centred, and sustainable approach to healthcare, using whatever social or therapeutic approaches are safe, effective, and empowering for patients".
Activities
The College champions social prescribing and is part of a wider consortium promoting the approach as a way to deal with health issues which may arise from social isolation, lack of exercise or stress. Social prescription allows healthcare professionals to signpost to a reading group or exercise class in the same way as they might prescribe an appropriate tablet.
Its events [1] cover subjects such as social prescribing, the use of diet in managing conditions from diabetes to cancer, and student education.
The College's recent work has focused around food, with conferences in 2016 and planned for 2017, highlighting the shifting consensus about what to eat (particularly around fat and sugar) and emerging science about the importance of the in digestion and health, as well as nutrition and mental health, the place of food in cancer treatment and in addressing diabetes and prediabetes.
Then College also offers broader training for healthcare professionals such as: