NCCIH Integrative Medicine Research Lecture Series

The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) presents the Integrative Medicine Research Lecture Series. The series provides overviews of the current state of research and practice involving complementary health approaches and explores perspectives on the emerging discipline of integrative medicine.

Karen Seal, MD, MPH is a professor of medicine and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. She is based at the San Francisco VA Health Care System (SFVAHCS), where she is director of the Integrated Care Clinic for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans and director of the Integrated Pain Team (IPT) Clinic.

Dr. Seal will discuss an ongoing pilot randomized control trial involving veterans with chronic pain and high-risk prescription opioid use, which aims to examine pain- and opioid-related outcomes resulting from biopsychosocial, nonpharmacologic care including motivational interviewing, shared decision-making and “SMART” goal planning as part of a multi-modal pain care plan.

Dr. Seal’s research focuses on developing and testing new integrated care interventions to address comorbid mental and physical health problems, including chronic pain and opioid misuse among veterans.

Currently, she is the principal investigator (PI) of two pragmatic effectiveness trials testing the implementation of telephone motivational coaching to achieve engagement in mental health treatment among rural veterans (“COACH”) and in the other (“OPTI”), decreased reliance on prescription opioids among veterans with chronic pain. She recently assumed the role of co-PI on a recently funded nine-site national Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) study, which is a comparative effectiveness trial of an integrated pain team approach, modeled after the SFVAHCS IPT Clinic, versus telephone collaborative management to improve pain and decrease opioid use among veterans who use the VA. This past year, Dr. Seal was appointed chair of the SFVAHCS Integrative Health Advisory Committee to promote the development of complementary and integrative health services for veteran patients and VA staff in her system.

For more information go to https://nccih.nih.gov/news/events/IMlectures