IHPC Board of Directors, Executive Director
NED Planning Team
Janet Kahn, Executive Director
Dr. Janet Kahn, Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont (UVM), is a massage therapist and a research scientist. She is a co-investigator on a study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, evaluating the use of therapeutic massage as an intervention for hospitalized patients with metastatic cancer. Dr. Kahn served the American Massage Therapy Association Foundation as vice-president for grants from 1993-1996 and as President from 1996-2000, working to increase awareness among massage therapists of the importance of research to advancing their profession. She now pursues the same goal as Director of Research for the Massage Therapy Research Consortium (MTRC), a collaborative effort of ten of the leading massage schools in North America, seeking to increase their own research capacity and to partner with other researchers investigating therapeutic applications of massage. Founded in 2003, MTRC members are currently conducting their first joint study, utilizing the schools' student clinics to gather qualitative data on how clients name and describe the effects of massage that they notice. Dr. Kahn's clinical practice focuses of treating people living with chronic pain, as well as people in trauma recovery. As President of Peace Village Projects she traveled to the Middle East frequently during the 1990's, treating children recovering from war trauma and training local day care workers in hands-on trauma recovery methods. Dr. Kahn holds a BA in Psychology from Antioch College, an Ed.M. from Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brandeis University. She received her training in therapeutic massage from the Institute of Traditional Medicine in Santa Fe, and from Potomac Massage Training Institute in Washington, DC. She was a member of NIH's National Advisory Council on Complementary and Alternative Medicine form 1999-2003. In 2004, she served as a member of the Workgroup on Manual and Manipulative Therapies as part of the process of creating NCCAM's second five-year Strategic Plan. Janet is a member of the Executive Committee of the Integrated Healthcare Policy Consortium (IHPC), and was on the Steering Committee of the group that initiated the National Policy Dialogue to Advance Integrated Care: Finding Common Ground. Janet lives in Burlington, Vermont, and consults to hospitals and CAM educational institutions in the US and Canada. She recently took a part-time position as executive director of the IHPC. (jkahn@igc.org, (802) 864-3346)