Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) continues to thrive as numerous physicians and very credible institutions including the Mayo Clinic embrace many of the therapies.

A surprisingly large number of Americans, estimated as high as 70 percent, have tried CAMacupuncture/acupressure, herb/vitamin therapy, hypnosis, chiropractic/massage, aromatherapy, magnetic therapy and reflexologyto cure their ills. A new termintegrative medicine is now being employed as traditional evidence-based medicine is combined with CAM for better treatment outcomes.

Statistics indicate that more Americans have tried CAM than have visited primary care physicians in recent years. Public awareness and the use of CAM are complex phenomena that have grown extraordinarily this past decade, according to MD Consult, an Internet source of medical information. This public knowledge is easily obtainable online and, when combined with the spiraling upward costs of modern healthcare, the growth of CAM has continued to accelerate.

Advertising and recommendations for CAM products are ubiquitous and pervasive, even though there has been very little support or encouragement from the traditional medical community. Often, patients, their families and friends are very well informed with the currently available information, which they believe is reliable, only to find out subsequently, that new "facts" may question their previous beliefs.

Obtaining evidence-based CAM would be the next major breakthrough for everyonepatients, physicians, and the purveyors of integrative medicine. The question is: How effective are complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies?

The answer isnobody really knows for sure; however, there is definite progress with scientific studies being reported in credible medical journals.

We have indications that some of these therapies may be helpful. Acupuncture, for example, may provide a number of medical benefits, from reducing pain to helping with chemotherapy-induced nausea. But the fact is, we lack any conclusive efficacy data about any of these alternatives.

One thing we do know: CAM therapies are expensivevery expensive. Estimates of the costs of CAM to Americans range $34 to $47 billion every year.

Consequently, the real concern we ought to be addressing is: Can we afford to continue to spend precious healthcare dollars on therapies of questionable scientific value, particularly at a moment when we are trying to control health care costs in general, in order to help the economy recover? We should encourage more resources being directed to proving the efficacy of CAM.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (http://nccam.nih.gov/health/), which has been funded with close to a billion dollars of taxpayer revenue over the past decade or so, brings a scientific approach to CAM. The results, especially for devotees of alternative medicine, are not what they want to believe. For example:

The rest is here:
The Doctor Is In: Complementary and alternative medicine thriving