Woodson Merrell, MD

In 1976, Dr. Merrell received his M.D. from Columbia University, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and completed his residency in Internal Medicine in 1979 at Roosevelt Hospital (now Mt Sinai West), Columbia’s teaching hospital on the Upper West Side. Dr. Merrell is Assistant Professor of Medicine, Icahn Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and Associate Attending Physician, Department of Medicine, Mt Sinai West Medical Center (formerly Roosevelt Hospital).

For 15 years he served as a board member of NY State’s Office of Professional Medical Conduct as an expert in integrative medicine. He has been a consultant to NY state and county medical societies and has given testimony to NYC Council as well as to both Houses of U.S. Congress.

From 1998-2015 Dr. Merrell was Founding Executive Director of the Beth Israel Center for Health and Healing in New York, the nation's largest and most comprehensive academic clinical center for Integrative Medicine. Over its lifetime the Center’s 24 practitioners saw 70,000 patient visits/year, published dozens of peer-reviewed articles, raised over $20 million and helped develop the model of enlightened preventive, integrative, patient-centered healthcare.

As a pioneer of Integrative Medicine, Dr. Merrell was also a founding member and served on executive and steering committees of the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine (a consortium of academic medical centers involving deans of all member medical schools) that has grown from 5 to 80 member medical schools.

He is the Conference Chair of the annual Integrative Healthcare Symposium, the nation’s premier CME/CEU gathering of Integrative Practitioners, which has been held in New York continuously since 2014. A former board member of the Institute of Functional Medicine (IFM)—with Drs. Jeffrey Bland, Mark Hyman, Joseph Pizzorno, David Perlmutter and Bethany Hays—Dr. Merrell has also completed key IFM training programs. He was a co-organizer and presenter of Columbia Medical School’s Botanical Medicine CME courses. He is a Charter Fellow of the American College of Acupuncture and was a Clinical Fellow, Academies of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Beijing and Shanghai, China, 1989 as well as having studied Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine with Ted Kaptchuk, OMD and Jeffrey Yuen, LAc.

Dr. Merrell has studied mind-body therapies extensively, including:

• Meditation with HH the Dalai Lama (Dharmsala, India and NYC); Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD; Kripalu; NY Zen Center and many others

• Stress Management with Bernie Siegel, MD; Herbert Benson, MD; Rachel Naomi Ramen, MD; Joan Borysenko, PhD; Dan Goleman, PhD; and Bellaruth Naperstak, MSW

• Imagery with Martin Rossman, MD

• Essential oils with Jane Buckle, RN PhD

• Hypnosis with Herbert Spiegel, MD as a medical student at Columbia Medical school

• Biofeedback with Robert Fried, PhD and David Haase, MD

Dr. Merrell has studied QiGong and TaiQi in China, and has practiced yoga at centers throughout the world including India (Soukya Ayurvedic Center, Bangalore), Canada (Sivananda Yoga, Laurentians), and Fiji (Oneness Institute). He was co-director of onsite training for Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program at Mt. Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center, founded by Donna Karan, directed by Rodney and Colleen Saidman Yee.