Victoria Maizes: Taking integrative medicine mainstream

Andrew Weil is responsible for popularizing integrative medicine. He says Victoria Maizes is an up-and-coming pioneer in the field.

Stacey Kalish | Jan/Feb 2009 issue

Victoria Maizes, Executive director, Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. Tucson, Arizona

Photo: Brendan Moore

Members of any fellowship class at the Arizona Center of Integrative Medicine perform an initiation ritual. Students stand in a circle with one person holding a ball of yarn. That person explains why he or she is embarking on this course of study, wraps the yarn around his or her wrist and tosses the ball to a colleague. Each person in the circle does this—stating motives, wrapping the yarn, passing it on. At the end, an intricate, overlapping web connects them all. Then they cut the yarn and make bracelets, which many wear throughout the two-year program.

This little ritual could also serve as a description of Victoria Maizes’ mission. As executive director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, she wants to make connections—between body and mind, East and West, physician and patient—and bind the principles of integrative medicine to contemporary clinical practice. “There is both art and science in medicine,” says Maizes. “It is right brain and left brain and the need to be comfortable moving between them, weaving that paradox.”

Maizes has woven that paradox herself, starting out working for a large corporate health-care provider before shifting into integrative medicine, a holistic movement that combines conventional Western practices with alternative and complementary treatments.

Maizes, who completed her residency in family medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has worked at the Center for more than 10 years, since entering its two-year fellowship course. Renowned physician and author Andrew Weil opened the Center in 1994, and invited Maizes to take over as the executive director soon after she completed her fellowship. She has since stewarded its growth from a small program educating four residential fellows per year to one that trains up to 130 professionals and has about 500 graduates.

The Center is housed in a cream Territorial-style building on the corner of a cactus-lined Tucson street. Maizes is fresh from a yoga class, her slim frame and poised demeanor hinting at veteran practice. She’s an eloquent speaker with intensely blue eyes and a wide smile. Sitting at a wooden conference table sipping green tea, she talks about the art of storytelling in medicine.

Stories are often the gateway to healing, she believes. She realized this early on in her medical training when she became more curious about finding out who a patient really was rather than just understanding his or her symptoms. To figure out what was wrong with part of a patient, she felt she needed to know each patient as a whole. “I became very interested in whether there was a connection between people’s stories and their condition. Why did Sally come in with diabetes and Frank come in with high blood pressure and Joe have something else? Was there something in their stories that could tell me?”

The room is cluttered with stories in the form of trinkets and gifts that cover the shelves and walls. Most intriguing are the hanging American-Indian drums with various objects stuck to them. Maizes explains they’re from the drum ritual, another initiation ceremony for incoming fellowship classes. After a brief drumming session, everyone is asked to pin something of personal symbolism to the drum’s skin. A red Frisbee was contributed by a doctor and avid Ultimate Frisbee player as a reminder to have fun in his approach to medicine. There are boxing gloves, hand-drawn caricatures of Weil, and a Nutcracker doll, to name a few. “They all have their stories,” says Maizes, laughing.

Integrative medicine, which draws on conventional Western medicine and a wide array of alternative and Eastern practices, is unfamiliar to many. But the movement is leaving its imprint on the nation’s hospitals, universities and medical schools. A landmark study on the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) appeared in 1993 in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was led by David Eisenberg, the director of Complementary and Integrative Medical Therapies at Harvard University. The study showed that 34 percent of adult Americans had used a complementary or alternative therapy in the past year. The majority used unconventional therapy for chronic, as opposed to life-threatening, medical conditions.

In May of 2004, another study, by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the National Center for Health Statistics, also found that 36 percent of adults in the U.S. used some form of CAM. When megavitamin therapy and prayer, practiced specifically for health reasons, were included in the definition of CAM, that number rose to 62 percent.

Elite centers like the Mayo Clinic, Duke University Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco now offer acupuncture, massage and other CAM services. Some 36 U.S. teaching hospitals are pushing to blend CAM with traditional care. A survey by the American Hospital Association found that 27 percent offered CAM in 2005, up from 8 percent in 1998.

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