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The Institute for Integrative Health is now the Nova Institute for Health.
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Brian Berman, MD

President & Founder

443-524-7395

bberman@novainstituteforhealth.org

My life’s work is guided by a sacred belief in the boundless potential within each person to awaken to their highest self—within the context of their lives, their families, and their communities. I honor the deep wisdom found in nurturing relationships, contemplative practices like meditation, nourishing the body with wholesome food, engaging with the arts, and connecting with the healing presence of nature.

Professor Brian Berman, MD, is the president of the Nova Institute for Health (formerly The Institute for Integrative Health), which he founded in 2007 to catalyze new ideas in health. He is also professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he was the director of the Center for Integrative Medicine.

Dr. Berman has dedicated his career to expanding the view of medicine to embrace a whole person approach that values the interplay between lifestyle behaviors, genetics, environment, personal beliefs, and sense of purpose. At the University of Maryland Center for Integrative Medicine, which he founded in 1991, he was principal investigator of five National Institutes of Health (NIH) Centers of Excellence grants as well as large clinical trials and basic science studies (totaling over $62 million in funding) focused on integrative medicine, including mind-body therapies, in the treatment of chronic and pain-related disorders. His research publications include seven books and more than 300 articles in leading medical journals. Through this work, he built collaborations with preeminent institutions in the United States, Hong Kong, Australia, Europe, and North America.

Dr. Berman has served as an advisor to the NIH, chairing and subsequently serving for three terms on the advisory committee to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. He cofounded and, for 25 years, directed the complementary medicine field of Cochrane, an internationally recognized leader in evidence-based medicine. He was a panel member of the Institute of Medicine’s report on complementary medicine and was the cofounder and first chair of the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine & Health (ACIMH), now comprising more than 85 academic medical centers. In 2005, Dr. Berman was honored with the prestigious Bravewell Leadership Award, which “celebrates and supports visionaries who have committed their medical careers to transforming health care in America.” He continues to serve as senior advisor to ACIMH, and in 2018 they awarded him the Bravewell Distinguished Service Award.

Through his passion as an integrative medical doctor, Dr. Berman introduced whole-person care into the University of Maryland’s large academic medical center, including the Shock Trauma Center, the Cancer Center, and the Pain Center, improving the care of thousands of patients per year. He also established courses for medical students and offered fellowships centered on the value of deep listening and understanding the connection between mind, body, and spirit.

Dr. Berman now leads the Nova Institute for Health, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to catalyze new ideas in health, explore the complex network of factors that influence health, and promote the well-being of individuals, communities, and the planet.

Reflections from Our Founder
More from Brian Berman

Watch Dr. Berman speak about the Seventh Generation Principle of the Iriquois people:

Hear Dr. Berman’s acceptance speech for the 2005 Bravewell Leadership Award:

Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.