Harvard to Pursue Alternative Medicine

Officials at Harvard Medical School want to learn more about how pharmaceutical drugs and herbal medicines interact with each other

June 2009

BOSTON (AP) Harvard Medical School, acknowledging that patients are increasingly experimenting with holistic and other alternative treatments, is creating an institute for nontraditional medicine.

Harvard researchers will examine the effectiveness of such treatments as acupuncture, herbal therapies and massage, and will look at how they work or interact with traditional medicine.

"You can't practice medicine these days without knowing what patients are doing, and a tremendous amount of them are doing it," said Dr. Dan Federman, who helped start Harvard's new program.

Harvard calls its program integrative medicine, for the combination of alternative and mainstream treatments. Americans made an estimated 600 million office visits to practitioners of integrative medicine and spent $30 billion on treatments, according to a recent Harvard study.

The school decided to start an integrative medicine program to learn more about how pharmaceutical drugs and herbal medicines interact with each other, and whether or not herbal medicines live up to their reputations.

The program, established with a $10-million gift from San Francisco philanthropist Bernard Osher and $2 million from the school, will work in conjunction with a similar one at the University of California at San Francisco.

The University of Arizona was one of the first schools to start an integrative medicine program. Founded in 1994, it now includes a month-long rotation for medical students that exposes them to nontraditional practices.

The University of Pennsylvania also has a program devoted to alternative medicines. Some other schools are incorporating naturopathic medicine, Chinese medicine and chiropractic techniques into curricula.

"I think a lot of it is hodgepodge medicine," said Dr. Monica Aggarwal of the New England Medical Center. "They are taking all these medications, and they have no idea what they are and if they are causing these problems. And we don't know what's in whatever they've taken."

From Healthy.com

http://www.ontcm.com/dotnetnuke/NewsEvents/tabid/639/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/1928/Harvard-to-Pursue-Alternative-Medicine.aspx