Research Seminar: Mindfulness-Based Health Promotion: A Brazilian MBI and Its Effectiveness in Public Policies

This event is in-person only, but open to UCSF clinicians, researchers, and educators.

This talk presents Mindfulness-Based Health Promotion (MBHP), a mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) developed in Brazil and culturally adapted to Brazilian public policies. Drawing on more than a decade of work at the Mente Aberta Center (Federal University of São Paulo), the talk traces the cultural aspects of these practices in Brazil, their adaptation to Brazilian public policies, especially to our national health system (SUS), and the evidence supporting MBHP's effectiveness as a public policy tool for supported self-care and health equity. The presentation also reflects on the speaker's own relationship to contemplative practice and its integration with preventive and lifestyle medicine.

Marcelo Demarzo, MD, PhD, is a physician specializing in Family Medicine, Sports Medicine, Preventive Medicine, and Lifestyle Medicine, and an expert (teacher, trainer and researcher) in secular, evidence-based mindfulness and compassion training. He is Associate Professor (Livre-Docente) at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), Senior Fellow in Primary Health Care at the University of Oxford, and Visiting Researcher at UTS Sydney, the University of Melbourne, Universidad de Zaragoza, and Macau University of Science and Technology. He is a CNPq Research Productivity Fellow and holds a PhD in Experimental Pathology. In 2011 he founded the Mente Aberta Center at UNIFESP and developed the Mindfulness-Based Health Promotion (MBHP) protocol, now widely implemented across the Brazilian public health system (SUS). He is the Executive Director of CABSIN (Brazilian Academic Consortium for Integrative Health), a collaborative network of over 300 affiliated researchers advancing evidence-based Traditional, Complementary, and Integrative Medicine and informing Brazilian public health policy. He also serves as a consultant to the World Health Organization and is a global reference in mindfulness, supported self-care, and health promotion research.

The Osher Center for Integrative Health hosts monthly research seminars that are open to the research and clinical community at large. Seminars are held from September to June and are generally virtual. Presentations cover a wide range of topics relating to integrative health, many with a focus on integrative health equity.

Research Seminars are organized by Ariana Thompson-Lastad, PhD and Joanne Qina’au, PhD, MA, E-YT750. Please contact Julia Wu ([email protected]) with any questions.