Sanghvi $40K Grant to Pilot Stress Reduction Program for Underserved

CINCINNATI—At noon on Friday, Nov. 3, at the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Medicine’s Kresge Auditorium, Sian Cotton, PhD, director of the UC Center for Integrative Health and Wellness, will announce a $40,000 grant from The Vijay R. Sanghvi Family Foundation to pilot an 8-week Mindfulness-Based, Stress Reduction program for an underserved population in our region.

"Our mission has always been to advance the practices and principles of integrative medicine and health across all socio-economic levels, and in particular, creating access for our most at-risk populations” says Cotton, a professor in the college’s Department of Family and Community Medicine, and outcomes researcher who has studied the benefits of complementary and integrative medicine. "This generous gift from the Sanghvi Family will allow us to extend the center’s current work in mindfulness-based approaches to additional communities with the greatest needs.” 

Conventional Western medicine, Cotton says, continues to focus primarily on the use of pharmaceuticals and surgical applications to help patients, but integrative medicine practices, like relaxation or meditation, stress management techniques, healthy nutrition and lifestyle modification have been shown to help both chronic and acute conditions. While the center has already been successful in implementing wellness programs across the university, and in some UC Health clinics, this pilot is the natural extension of the center’s mission: to practically teach the benefits of integrative medicine techniques across a variety of populations to improve the health and wellness of our community.

The grant announcement is being made in concert with The Dr. Khushman V. Sanghvi Memorial Lectureship on the Mind-Body Interface in Health and Healing. The lectureship series and foundation was established by UC cardiologist Vijay Sanghvi, MD, (1935-2015) and his daughters, in memory of his wife, Khushman Sanghvi (1943-2004), also a physician. The goal of the lectureship is to expose students, health care professionals and interested community members to the importance and benefit of integrative medicine and health.

This year’s esteemed speaker Margaret Chesney, PhD, will present "Integrative Medicine: Fad or Frontier?  Implications for Public Health.” Chesney is a professor emeritus of the University of California San Francisco, the former deputy director of the National Institutes of Health National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, and the immediate past chair of the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health (www.imconsortium.org).

"This grant is evidence of the deep commitment the Sanghvi family has to honoring their parents’ memory in a way that bolsters integrative health practices that the Sanghvis believed in and practiced during their lifetime,” says Gabe Trieger, associate director of development for UC Foundation.

The Sanghvi Memorial Lectureship lecture is open to the public. Interest in financially supporting the mission and programs of the Center for Integrative Health and Wellness should be directed to gabriel.trieger@uc.edu