Heidi Allespach, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Clinical Family Medicine, Medicine & Surgery at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. For over 20 years, Dr. Allespach has specialized in the training of family medicine, internal medicine & surgery residents & fellows, practicing physicians, medical students & counselors. She has developed a targeted cognitive-behavioral stress management (STM) model for physicians to utilize in a time-limited (3-visit) medical setting. She has also tailored this model specifically for use in nonpharmacologic pain management (NPM) & integrates the patient’s spiritual beliefs into these frameworks when appropriate.

Her main specialty areas within behavioral medicine are physician wellness, chronic pain, addiction, & teaching office-based cognitive behavioral stress management interventions. She has published numerous articles on physician wellness, difficult patients, chronic pain and addiction, among others, & has lectured extensively on those topics at many national conferences. Dr Allespach developed teaching models (including “The CALMER Approach” “Rule of Six 2s,” and “The 7 Cs”, “Wargaming with the Chiefs,” “Show and Tell Rounds”), specifically for physicians to use when working with challenging Dr-Pt encounters. She has also lectured both nationally and internationally on the topic of Motivational Interviewing.