For more than a year, UCI officials have been quietly hashing out a boundary-pushing proposal to reshape the campus and refashion healthcare in Orange County and beyond. It’s Western-meets-Eastern medicine, backed by scientific research and 21st-century technology.
The epicenter will rise on what is now a patch of weeds and rocks along the southwestern edge of campus, near the corner of Bison and California avenues. Thanks to a blockbuster $200 million gift to UCI from Broadcom co-founder Henry Samueli and his wife, Susan, a former holistic health practitioner, the parcel will soon metamorphose into a realigned College of Health Sciences. Named after the couple and anchored by the schools of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy and Population Health, the college hopes to pioneer an interdisciplinary, integrative approach to health that shifts the focus from treating ailments to averting them.
Although a number of top universities house integrative medicine units, UCI aims to be the first to have its entire health network adopt the strategy, which involves analyzing multiple aspects of a patient’s life – from genetics to emotions to environment – and then prescribing conventional as well as carefully vetted nonconventional therapies to promote wellness.