Lecturer on Medicine

Eric Jacobson is a medical anthropologist and clinical trialist who investigates classical Asian medicines, placebo phenomena, and alternative manual therapies. His dissertation on the approach of affective and anxiety disorders in contemporary classical Tibetan medicine was based on field work in Tibetan refugee communities in northern India and on his original translations of Tibetan medical texts. Since 2001 as a member of the Placebo Research Group at Osher Research Center he has worked on NIH-funded clinical research on the placebo response and the experience of healing. Other projects have included a study of diagnostic reasoning in Traditional Chinese Medicine and a multi-disciplinary study of healing in Irritable Bowel Syndrome. An additional dimension of Dr. Jacobson's research stems from his background of over thirty years as a practitioner of the Rolf method of Structural Integration, an alternative system of manual therapy. In this connection he was a principal organizer and program chairman for the First International Congress on Fascia Research, 2007 - the first scientific conference devoted to this topic. In October 2008 he received a mid-career training grant from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to investigate "Structural Integration for Chronic Low Back Pain.