Janet Kahn

Janet Kahn is an assistant professor at Vermont College of Medicine. She is nationally known and respected in the field of integrative health and clinical research. By presidential appointment, she is a member of the Advisory Board on Prevention, Health Promotion and Integrative and Public Health and was a member of the National Institutes for Health National Advisory Council on Complementary and Alternative Medicine from 1999-2003 and 2009-2011.

She was also a member of the steering committee that initiated the National Policy Dialogue to Advance Integrated Care: “Finding Common Ground,” which resulted in creation of the Integrated Healthcare Policy Consortium for which she served as executive director from 2005-2011. She is also a massage therapist and a medical sociologist.

A senior policy advisor for the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine, Dr. Kahn also serves as co-principal investigator of Mission Reconnect, an initiative supported by the National Institute of Mental Health. This initiative brings instruction in mind-body techniques and partner massage to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and their partners in an effort to promote individual and family well-being.

Dr. Kahn has been a co-investigator on many massage-related studies with partners at Group Health Research Institute, Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Collinge and Associates. She served the Massage Therapy Foundation (formerly American Massage Therapy Association Foundation) as vice president for grants and then as president, working to increase awareness of the importance of research to advance the profession. She pursued the same goal as director of research for the Massage Therapy Research Consortium, a collaborative of leading massage schools that are building their research capacity.

In her clinical practice, Dr. Kahn focuses on treating people living with chronic pain, as well as people in trauma recovery. In 2008, with William Collinge, she won two Telly Awards for the DVD, “Touch, Caring and Cancer.” As president of Peace Village Projects, she traveled to the Middle East to treat children recovering from war trauma and to train local day care workers in hands-on trauma recovery methods.

Dr. Kahn holds a bachelor’s degree from Antioch College, a Master of Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a doctorate from Brandeis University. A long-time friend of MUIH, Dr. Kahn is familiar with the MUIH history and has a high respect for the level of academic programming and for the organization’s transformation over the past few years. She has a sincere interest in assisting MUIH with becoming a prominent factor in the evolution of integrative health care by offering her knowledge, legislative insight, industry contacts, and academic and clinical research experience.