Promoting Ayurveda Globally - Dr. Robert Saper
Robert Saper, MD, MPH , Director of Integrative Medicine & Associate Professor
Boston University School of Medicine, ,Boston Medical Center, MA, USA
Promoting Ayurveda Globally through Collaboration
Dr. Saper is Director of Integrative Medicine in the Boston Medical Center Department of Family Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He is also an Associate Professor at the Boston University School of Medicine. He has 25 years of experience in integrative medicine: the responsible integration of complementary therapies such as yoga, massage and acupuncture with conventional medicine. Dr. Saper attended Brandeis University for his undergraduate education. As a Harvard medical student, he traveled to the Findhorn Center in Scotland to study holistic healing and also studied yoga at the Kripalu Center in Western Massachusetts. After graduating Harvard Medical School in 1988, he completed a family medicine residency and chief residency at UCSF from 1988-92 and was in private practice for 8 years in the San Francisco Bay area. From 2001 to 2004, he completed a three year Complementary Medicine Research Fellowship at Harvard, which included an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. He completed a five year Academic Career Development Grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. He has published a pilot study comparing hatha yoga to standard medical care for chronic low back pain. He recently received a grant from the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine to conduct a comparative effectiveness randomized controlled trial of hatha yoga, physical therapy, and education for chronic low back pain in low-income minority populations. Dr. Saper has taken a leadership role in building research, educational, and clinical programs in integrative medicine at Boston University.