Grand rounds: Mindfulness‑Oriented Recovery Enhancement: Unifying Neuroscience, Clinical Innovation, and Mind‑Body Medicine to Transform the Future of Pain and Addiction Care

Join us for our November Integrative Medicine Grand Rounds: Harvard Medical School Distinguished Lecture in Mind Body Research and Health, featuring distinguished lecturer Eric Garland, PhD.

This lecture is held jointly with the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at MGH, and the Center for Mindfulness & Compassion at Cambridge Health Alliance.

This lecture will present twenty years of mechanistic, clinical, and translational research on Mindfulness‑Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE), a neuroscience‑informed, evidence‑based mind‑body intervention designed to transform the treatment of chronic pain, addiction, and emotional suffering. MORE integrates mindfulness training, cognitive reappraisal, and savoring of natural rewards to drive targeted neuroplasticity in the brain. Drawing on findings from sixteen randomized controlled trials, neurophysiological studies, cost effectiveness research, and large‑scale implementation efforts, the lecture will illustrate how MORE reshapes attention, emotion, and meaning to support recovery, healing, and resilience. Attendees will learn how these mechanistic insights translate into measurable clinical improvements, including reductions in opioid misuse, craving, pain severity, and healthcare utilization. The session will offer a forward‑looking vision for the future of mind‑body medicine, showing how MORE is being integrated with psychedelics, neurofeedback, and closed‑loop precision medicine interventions to help shape the next generation of behavioral health care.

Speaker:
Eric Garland, PhD, is endowed professor in health sciences at the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion, and professor in the Department of Psychiatry at University of California San Diego (UCSD).