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Speaking

Michael H. Cohen, Esq. is available to appear on stage before your group in Los Angeles and nationwide; please contact him to discuss lecture topics. A pdf with sample lectures is available by clicking here.
 
Contact
(Three One Zero) 749.4029
Photo for event use

Michael has spoken to more than 100 audiences including physicians at top medical schools (Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins); hospitals and health care systems (Kaiser, MGH and Banner Health); professional societies; policy makers and government-related organizations; legal institutions; specialty audiences; and business groups.

Quick Biography

Michael H. Cohen is a lawyer who advises clients on strategic legal issues at the intersection of business, health care, technology, and spirituality. While on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, Michael helped Harvard hospital integrate complementary medicine into conventional care. He is the author of several books that look at how the public's pursuit of health & wellness has changed -- and how both the law and the medical profession are struggling to respond to that change.

 

Topics can include:

•  Regulatory efforts to accommodate complementary medicine.

•  Alternative caregivers' legal and ethical obligations.

•  How to talk your doctor about alternative therapies and address medical and institutional concerns so as to get your needs met.

•  The extent of your right to keep your dietary supplements (such as St. John’s wort or gingko) as an in-patient.

•  The obscure institutional nooks and crannies through which you might get your hospital to offer you alternative therapies (such as acupuncture for pain relief).

•  How to enlist the help of professional organizations in your quest for holistic healthcare when dealing with a mainstream medical organization such as a hospital.

•  Ways to overcome liability concerns when you try to coordinate your conventional and alternative caregivers.

•  Parental liabilities that may arise when you treat your child with alternative therapies such as homeopathy for chronic ear infections, special diets and nutritional protocols, and other treatments. Can these efforts be used against you in a divorce?

•  Ways to tap into medical respect for “mind-body” therapies to give yourself a broader array of health care choices.

•  How the internet and upscale supermarkets effect the nutritional supplement industry.

•  How telemedicine is changing the face of caregiving, and blurring the once-clear relationship between doctor and patient.

•  The legal limits to health claims made by nutritional supplements.

•  The larger philosophical questions about our evolving approaches to health & wellness.

•  Our ability to reconcile science and religion.


“Michael Cohen eloquently explores pathways to healing — a universal human desire. He opens our eyes to new ways to think about health — beyond the exclusivity of science and medicine to a wonderful array of different traditions and methodologies.”
— Lawrence O. Gostin

Associate Dean, Georgetown University Law Center; Director of the Center for Law and the Public's Health

“Courageous, insightful, innovative, and inspiring, Cohen goes where few dare tread, and where all are headed - toward a global perspective in medicine.”
— Wayne B. Jonas, MD
Director of the Samueli Institute;
Former Director, Office of Alternative Medicine, NIH

  “I heard Michael present the legal landscape of this very novel and unfamiliar area of health care to a ballroom filled with thought leaders from medical education and health care delivery systems, and was immediately impressed with his intellect and thoughtfulness. On that day he not only summarized the state of the law regarding complementary medicine, but also gave us a glimpse of what the future might hold for medicine...
     Michael's work unquestionably stands with that of other luminaries such as Rachel Naomi Remen MD, Jon Kabat-Zinn MD, and Dean Ornish, MD, who have been pioneers in this area.”
— Karen E. Adams, MD

Clinical Consultant, Center for Ethics in Health Care, Oregon Health and Sciences University
  “Michael H. Cohen admirably pushes the frontiers of law, medicine, ethics, and health care policy. In an engaging, insightful, and provocative analysis, he opens a door to the future of medicine, thus laying the foundation for a regulatory framework that supports human physical, as well as spiritual, health.”
— Kenneth R. Pelletier, PhD

Former Director, Stanford Corporate Health Program; Clinical Professor of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine

“Cohen does for medicine what Kuhn did for science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
— Rosemary Tong, PhD

Distinguished Professor in Health Care Ethics, Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte



Video of Selected Speaking Engagements

                       
  “Integrative Medicine: Can It Be Legally Defensible, Ethically Appropriate and Clinically Responsible?”

University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center
    “Informed Consent”

Produced by Complementary / Integrative Medicine Education Resources,
University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center
    “Naturopathic Medical Ethics in the 21st Century”

Oregon Board of Naturopathic Examiners (OBNE)

    “Complementary and Alternative Medicine Legal Issues”

Harvard Medical School Department of Continuing Education
 



Audio of Selected Speaking Engagements


 


Books By Michael H. Cohen

  • Healing at the Borderland of Medicine and Religion (2006)
  • The Practice of Integrative Medicine: A Legal and Operation Guide (2006)
  • Legal Issues in Integrative Medicine: A Guide to Clinicians, Hospitals, and Patients (2005)
  • Future Medicine: Regulatory Challenges, and Therapeutic Pathways to Health Care and Healing in Human Transformation (2003)
  • Beyond Complementary Medicine: Legal and Ethical Perspectives on Health Care and Human Evolution (2000)
  • Complementary and Alternative Medicine (1998)


  • More Info on Michael's Books click here

    Michael H. Cohen on Amazon.com click here
     
      “Snippets of the body of alternative medicine are skillfully dissected and probed by Cohen's legal scalpel in a manner that is informative and intellectually stimulating.
         For persons wishing...knowledge and understanding of the present legal environment for alternative medicine in the United States, this book is an excellent choice.
    Journal of the
    American Medical Association

    Full JAMA Review (.pdf)