Please use the Contact Form to send us your comments or questions about the Marino Center. As always, if you have an urgent health matter, please call the Cambridge Center at 617-661-6225 or the Wellesley Center at 781-235-5200.
Please use your secure login account to the Patient Portal to send messages or questions to your physician or to request RX refills, appointments, referrals or anything else related to your care. You can rest assured that we will protect your privacy in all cases and will never share your contact information.
2500 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02140
ph 617.661.6225
fax 617.492.2002
372 Washington Street
Wellesley, MA 02481
ph 781.235.5200
fax 781.235.1103
Our research agenda encompasses clinical trials of alternative and traditional remedies and protocols, and critical analyses of the service delivery system.
Current research projects/studies include:
The Effectiveness of Integrative Medicine Study – NIH Grant Awarded
In 2009, The Marino Center for Integrative Health, along with the University of Arizona, was awarded a grant to study the comparative effectiveness of Integrative Medicine. The entire project award was just under 1 million dollars, with approximately half allocated to the Marino Center.
With this grant money, the Marino Center and the University of Arizona have been, over the past two years, examining the immense amount of clinical data created daily at the Marino Center, to generate knowledge on the comparative effectiveness of treatment modalities. The study compares complementary and alternative therapies among themselves, and with conventional medicine.
This observational study looks at four common conditions: back pain, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and peri-menopause. It is anticipated that further studies will result from this one. While one intent is to produce important disease-specific results, the study’s principal significance is in its role as a first step toward the much larger enterprise for changing how clinical research can articulate with clinical practice. Traditional medical research is done in isolation from clinical practice in narrowly focused randomized controlled trials (RCT). Our research investigates real clinical encounters using event stream methodology to analyze a variety of factors and outcomes simultaneously. While RCT's remain the gold standard for testing narrowly-focused questions, it has become increasingly clear that not all important questions about the delivery of healthcare can be answered by RCTs. Looking at real-world clinical encounters is a new way of conducting and thinking about research
The long-range goal of this project is to create a sustainable model for collaboration of multiple clinical centers for conducting focused observational comparative effectiveness studies within and across multi-modality clinics, including more complex health care delivery systems and a very broad range of modalities.
