RRECI

Melanie A. Gold, DO, DABMA, DMQ

 

Dr. Melanie A. Gold is currently a Special Lecturer and former Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Child and Adolescent Health, Section of Adolescent Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center as well as a current Special Lecturer and former Professor in the Department of Population & Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health. She was the Medical Director of NewYork Presbyterian or NYP’s seven School Based Health Centers (SBHCs) from 2014 to 2022. Dr. Gold is an osteopathic physician, a pediatrician, and a board-certified adolescent medicine sub-specialist. She is a Diplomat of the American Board of Medical Acupuncture since 2014. She served as a board member of the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture and on their membership committee from 2015-2017. Dr. Gold also served as an elected member of the Executive Committee of the Section on Integrative Medicine for the American Academy of Pediatrics from 2015 to 2018.

 

Over the past three decades, Dr. Gold have incorporated integrative medicine into her clinical practice using osteopathic manipulation, medical hypnosis, Motivational Interviewing, Reiki, medical acupuncture, Chinese manual medicine (Tuina and Shonishin), and aromatherapy; she completed a 3-year doctorate in Medical Qi Gong in 2017 and has studied Ayurvedic Medicine and Transcendental Meditation. Dr. Gold expanded pediatric integrative health care at the NYPs SBHCs by adding services including: osteopathic manipulation, medical acupuncture, acupressure, Emotional Freedom Technique Tapping, several forms of mindfulness, yoga, meditation, aromatherapy, aroma-acupoint therapy, and hypnotherapy. She collaborates with the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York’s Multidisciplinary Support Network in creating integrative health resources and training for faculty, staff, and trainees to share with patient and families to address patient symptom management.

 

Dr. Gold is a co-investigator on a NIH-funded study whose aim is to develop and test, in a randomized controlled trial, the efficacy of a mind-body integrative health sleep intervention to improve sleep quality among adolescent SBHC patients compared to SBHC patients receiving a control intervention of didactic information about sleep. Most recently, Dr. Gold has turned her focus to teaching and evaluating the training of health care professionals in the use of integrative therapies for their own self care and to enhance their credibility and effectiveness in teaching patients and patients’ families these same techniques for symptom management.