You are elected AOA President. What would be your platform; and how would you proceed to achieve the core priorities of your platform?

As your president, I will see to it that we affect real change in our osteopathic community, while improving the integrity of our profession. This change must come from the AOA, our nation-wide community of physicians, pre and post graduate medical education systems, and our students.

We in the AOA must collaborate with other osteopathic leaders, such as OPSC, to make sure our profession maintains osteopathic autonomy in the medical community. The recent merger of the Naturopathic Medicine Committee into the Osteopathic Medical Board of California (OMBC) is an example of the work we have to do to educate leaders of our country about osteopathic medicine. ABX420 was signed into law as part of the “urgent” budget process as of October 23, 2009, and allows naturopaths to sit in judgment over osteopathic physicians who come before the licensure board. In California, naturopaths are not trained clinically, cannot prescribe medications independently, and cannot perform surgery. The California state legislature saw osteopathic physicians equivalent to naturopaths, and it did not cross their minds that this kind of merger would possibly endanger patient safety. Part of my solution to this is to hold DO Day Nation-wide this year.

I am holding a meeting with the AOA leadership this month to plan our next DO Day effort, which will target the capitol of each state. We can educate state governments about osteopathic medicine and our role in health care reform. The state governments should know that osteopathic physicians are living advocates of more cost effective, preventative, and high quality health care. We will indicate the trends; osteopathic physicians are less likely to perform expensive procedures and more likely to treat the whole person by looking at the root of the problem. Osteopathic medicine effectively helps prevent chronic diseases like diabetes; the management of which comprises a significant amount of the health cost in this country. We will advocate that as we are physicians, it is important that we maintain our autonomy in licensing, practice, and legislative influence. We will ask for their support in our advocacy against ABX420. Our visit may even convince them find osteopathic physicians to care for their families.

In our political efforts, we will increase collaboration with the AAO to make sure that in our actions and advocacy, we have osteopathic principles and practice at heart. We will focus on the osteopathic core principles while educating politicians and the public about our profession. Osteopathic manipulative medicine sets our profession apart from allopathic medicine, and we need to show the public that this approach is beneficial for a population with increasing chronic health problems.

And finally, we cannot hope to maintain our autonomy as a profession or educate the public about osteopathic medicine unless we start with osteopathic medical education. We must make it easier for our schools to provide the best quality OMM education necessary so that future osteopathic physicians feel comfortable treating their patients with OMT. We can do this by increasing the amount of student fellowship positions at each school to one fellow per twenty students. Students will be able to get the personal attention they need with this increase in faculty. In addition to increasing numbers, we need to increase the quality of OMM knowledge with which we teach our students the theories behind osteopathic diagnosis and treatment. OMM faculty and fellows should be well versed in current osteopathic research to back the techniques they teach, and there should be an increase in OMM research efforts. We will provide grants to schools for faculty to initiate preliminary studies with their fellows and medical students. We will invest in a research-consulting firm to work with our principle investigators on maximizing the scientific validity of their studies. We need to produce more DO’s who use OMM in order for us to get the national recognition that we deserve, and we need to prove that our techniques produce real, reliable results.

I would also like to draft an equality resolution that indicates that the AOA is in support of equal opportunity for osteopathic physicians and students regardless of gender and sexual preferences.

Osteopathic physicians provide health care consistent with the needs of the average American family. We will propagate this message by advocating maintenance of our autonomy in the health care field, reinforcing the core principles in our osteopathic medical schools, and by increasing efforts to conduct scientifically sound osteopathic research. As your president, I will do everything in my power to help achieve these goals during my term. Thank you.