This 3 year project will conduct a randomized controlled trial on Biofield Therapies for treating anxiety, with purposeful recruitment and sampling of BIPOC and LGBTQI+ communities. Our current data indicate that delivering a biofield-based sound therapy was feasible and effective for substantially reducing anxiety.  However, because feasibility studies do not have control or comparison groups and are done on a very small group of people, and because we had a very brief intervention with no follow-up measurements,  it is unknown whether

1) this approach is helpful for a more diverse population (including BIPOC and LGBTQI+ communities) suffering from anxiety
2) how long the effects might last after the intervention is over
3) whether reductions in anxiety are comparable to relaxation or other gold-standard approaches for clinical care.

We hope to answer these questions and provide an evidence base for holistic care for anxiety in a diverse population.  If Biofield Therapies is shown to be helpful and effective for persons with anxiety, this therapy can be considered by healthcare administrators to be integrated into clinic and hospital settings, allowing us to more readily integrate holistic therapies into healthcare and self-care.

Our mission is to generate health and decrease chronic disease by facilitating the practices underlying physical and psychological well being for diverse, low-income, and under-resourced populations. Open Source Wellness has developed an innovative, transdiagnostic, and experiential model for supporting health behavior change, by facilitating the basic practices that underlie physical and psychological health outcomes (physical movement, healthy meals, stress reduction, and social support). Our work spans the clinical-community continuum, collaborating with healthcare providers to fill “Behavioral Prescriptions,” and working deeply within communities to build trust, social capital, and peer leadership around health and well being.

Open Source Wellness partners with FQHC’s to deliver virtual group medical visits, and achieves both clinical outcomes and a revenue-positive implementation for the clinic: due to dramatically increased billing, the clinic generates more revenue than it costs to contract with OSW. The earning power of this model has been well-documented, and is compelling to potential clinical FQHC partners. However, in sharing about the OSW group medical visit partnership model, we find that FQHC CFO’s are understandably risk-averse, focused on avoiding any possible loss especially during a time of lost revenue, diminished billing, and massive operational changes due to COVID-19. While they fully understand that partnership with OSW would in fact generate additional revenue for their clinics, the risk of committing to a financial contract before revenues increase is intolerable. 

In response to this challenge, the OSW leadership team and board are committed to researching, designing, and implementing a risk reduction system for new clinical partners, effectively removing barriers to implementation in clinics and communities of color that are resource-strapped and understandably cautious about contracting with community partners.

In 2019, the Real Food Campaign (RFC) lab worked with 100 grower partners and 15 citizen scientists to process 1,800 samples from 20 states in the US to test 6 crops: carrots, spinach, tomatoes, kale, lettuce and grapes. As samples enter the lab they are tested with the Bionutrient Meter then extracted and analyzed for antioxidants, polyphenols, and 17 minerals (2018 results). Our lab’s accomplishments over the past two years were a major step in advancing the Bionutrient Food Association’s mission of increasing quality in the food system.

The BFA is now creating a new administrative role for a Citizen Science Coordinator in order to expand our Citizen Science initiative. The initiative began two years ago with a data partner project to engage consumers in data collection, and in 2019 we launched our grower partner program, bringing growers into the process as well. During this time, participants have helped us to document management practices, environmental conditions, soil health, plant health, carbon sequestration, nutrient density and farm viability. We can now begin to look scientifically for the
connections between these factors.

The Mindfulness Curriculum Development and Implementation Project (the Project) will support the creation of a mindfulness education curriculum that informs a pilot implementation of an 8-week mindfulness workshop for 25 children and youth who are receiving treatment for cancer, as well as their siblings, who live at the Ronald McDonald House (RMH) at Stanford University in Palo Alto. The curriculum will help these children and youth reduce the stress and anxiety they endure as a result of cancer and as they
learn to face an uncertain future.

Our clinical healthcare-based model, developed in partnership with Alameda Health System (Hayward Wellness Center), has emerged as a spreadable/scalable intervention, and has generated substantial interest in the last year. In brief, Open Source Wellness delivers its signature trans diagnostic, experiential program in full workflow integration and electronic-medical-record integration on site at the clinic. Importantly, and key to our success in spreading this model, we have created a financially sustainable model via group medical visits (an MD or NP participates in the group, and then bills insurance for each patient).

The partnership inherent in this model builds in a robust level of clinical-community integration: services are co-designed, dually delivered, and fully integrated into the clinical workflow (via screening, referral, and booking). Of particular importance, due to the emphasis on peer and lay leadership, as well as behavioral treatment and prevention instead of medical intervention, this kind of partnership is profoundly affordable and scalable across the healthcare safety net. With content similar to Dean Ornish’s highly effective Lifestyle Medicine program (recently funded by CMS) but at less than 1⁄4 the cost, the OSW Behavioral Pharmacy model has the potential and the vision to be the democratization of health behavior change.

Our clinical healthcare-based model, developed in partnership with Alameda Health System (Hayward Wellness Center), has emerged as a spreadable/scalable intervention, and has generated substantial interest in the last year. In brief, Open Source Wellness delivers its signature trans diagnostic, experiential program in full workflow integration and electronic-medical-record integration on site at the clinic. Importantly, and key to our success in spreading this model, we have created a financially sustainable model via group medical visits (an MD or NP participates in the group, and then bills insurance for each patient).

The partnership inherent in this model builds in a robust level of clinical-community integration: services are co-designed, dually delivered, and fully integrated into the clinical workflow (via screening, referral, and booking). Of particular importance, due to the emphasis on peer and lay leadership, as well as behavioral treatment and prevention instead of medical intervention, this kind of partnership is profoundly affordable and scalable across the healthcare safety net. With content similar to Dean Ornish’s highly effective Lifestyle Medicine program (recently funded by CMS) but at less than 1⁄4 the cost, the OSW Behavioral Pharmacy model has the potential and the vision to be the democratization of health behavior change.