Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the United States

358 Pages·2005·8.39 MB·English

by  Committee on the Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine by the American Public

Complementary
and
Alternative
Medicine
IN THE UNITED STATES
Committee on the Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine
by the American Public
Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS 500 Fifth Street, N.W. Washington, DC 20001
NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Govern-
ing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the
councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineer-
ing, and the Institute of Medicine. The members of the committee responsible for
the report were chosen for their special competences and with regard for appropri-
ate balance.
This study was supported by Contract No. 200N01-OD-4-2139 between the Na-
tional Academy of Sciences and the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality,
National Institutes of Health. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommenda-
tions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily
reflect the view of the organizations or agencies that provided support for this
project.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Institute of Medicine (U.S.). Committee on the Use of Complementary and
Alternative Medicine by the American Public.
Complementary and alternative medicine in the United States / Committee on
the Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine by the American Public,
Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-309-09270-1 (hardcover)
1. Alternative medicine—United States.
[DNLM: 1. Complementary Therapies—United States. 2. Biomedical
Research—United States. 3. Health Policy—United States. WB 890 I59 2004] I.
Title.
R733.I5633 2004
615.5′0973—dc22
2004029011
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COMMITTEE ON THE USE OF COMPLEMENTARY AND
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE BY THE AMERICAN PUBLIC
Stuart Bondurant, MD (Chair), Interim Executive Vice President and
Executive Dean, Georgetown University Medical Center
Joyce K. Anastasi, PhD, RN, FAAN, LAc, Helen F. Pettit Endowed
Chair, Professor of Clinical Nursing, Columbia University School of
Nursing
Brian Berman, MD, Professor of Family Medicine, Director, Center for
Integrative Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine
Margaret Buhrmaster, Director, Office of Regulatory Reform, New York
State Department of Health
Gerard N. Burrow, MD, David Paige Smith Professor Emeritus of
Medicine, Dean Emeritus, Yale University School of Medicine
Michele Chang, MPH, CMT, Private practice, Arlington, Virginia
Larry R. Churchill, PhD, Anne Geddes Stahlman Professor of Medical
Ethics, Vanderbilt University
Florence Comite, MD, Associate Clinical Professor, Yale University
School of Medicine, and Founder, Medical Director,
DestinationsHealth
Jeanne Drisko, MD, Associate Professor, Program in Integrative
Medicine: Functional Medicine and Complementary and Alternative
Therapies, University of Kansas Medical Center
David M. Eisenberg, MD, Director, Osher Institute; Director, Division
for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative
Medical Therapies; and The Bernard Osher Associate Professor of
Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Alfred P. Fishman, MD, William Maul Measey Professor Emeritus of
Medicine, and Senior Associate Dean for Program Development,
University of Pennsylvania Health System
Susan Folkman, PhD, Director, Osher Center for Integrative Medicine,
and Osher Foundation Distinguished Professor of Integrative
Medicine, Professor of Medicine, University of California, San
Francisco
Albert Mulley, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Associate Professor
of Health Policy, Harvard Medical School; Chief, General Medicine
Division; and Director, Medical Practices Evaluation Center,
Massachusetts General Hospital
David Nerenz, PhD, Senior Staff Investigator, Center for Health Services
Research, Henry Ford Health System
v
Mark Nichter, PhD, MPH, Professor of Anthropology, Professor of
Family and Community Medicine, Professor of Public Health,
University of Arizona
Bernard Rosof, MD, FACP, Senior Vice President for Corporate
Relations and Health Affairs, North Shore Long Island Jewish Health
System
Harold Sox, MD, FACP, Editor, Annals of Internal Medicine
Liaison to Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
Ellen Gritz, PhD, Professor and Chair, Frank T. McGraw Memorial
Chair in the Study of Cancer, and Department of Behavioral Science,
The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center
Committee Consultant
Michael H. Cohen, JD, MBA, MFA, Assistant Professor of Medicine,
Harvard Medical School, and Attorney-at-Law
Staff
Lyla M. Hernandez, MPH, Study Director
Kysa Christie, Senior Program Associate
Makisha Wiley, Senior Program Assistant
Rose Marie Martinez, ScD, Director, Board on Health Promotion and
Disease Prevention
vi
Preface
Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies, by what-
ever name they are called, have existed from antiquity. Recognition of the
widespread use of CAM by the people of the United States has given new
emphasis to the need to better understand the effects of these treatments
from the perspective of personal and public health. To provide a rational,
effective, efficient, and personally satisfactory health care system, it is im-
portant and useful to know who is using CAM therapies and why, how the
public obtains information about CAM and how credible that information
is, why many users of CAM do not inform their physicians about such use,
just what CAM is, and whether these therapies are safe and effective.
It is only relatively recently, however, that there has been a serious
general interest in the United States in investigating and evaluating these
therapies. In 1992 the U.S. Congress established the Office of Alternative
Medicine (OAM) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to begin to
develop a baseline of information on CAM use in the United States. In 1999
the Congress elevated OAM to the National Center for Complementary
and Alternative Medicine and appropriated $48.9 million to carry out
work directly related to CAM. Other institutes of NIH and other federal
agencies also engaged in the effort and by 2003, 19 institutes and centers
within NIH were collectively spending $315.5 million on CAM-related
research and other activities.
This report was commissioned in September 2002, when 16 NIH insti-
tutes, centers, and offices plus the Agency for Healthcare Research and
Quality asked the Institute of Medicine to convene a study committee to
explore scientific, policy, and practice questions that arise from the signifi-
vii
viii PREFACE
cant and increasing use of CAM therapies by the American public. Specifi-
cally, this study was asked to
1. Describe the use of CAM therapies by the American public and
provide a comprehensive overview, to the extent that data are available, of
the therapies in widespread use, the populations that use them, and what is
known about how they are provided.
2. Identify the major scientific, policy, and practice issues related to
CAM research and to the translation of validated therapies into conven-
tional medical practice.
3. Develop conceptual models or frameworks to guide public- and
private-sector decision making as research and practice communities con-
front the challenges of conducting research on CAM, translating research
findings into practice, and addressing the distinct policy and practice bar-
riers inherent in that translation.
Furthermore, the committee was asked to explore several issues,
including
• the methodological difficulties in the conduct of rigorous research
on CAM therapies and how these relate to issues in regulation and practice,
with exploration of the options that can be used to address the difficulties
identified.
• the shortage of highly skilled practitioners who are able to partici-
pate in scientific inquiry that meets NIH guidelines and who have access to
the institutions where such research is conducted.
• the shortage of receptive, integrated research environments and the
barriers to developing multidisciplinary teams that include CAM and con-
ventional medical practitioners.
• the availability of standardized and well-characterized materials and
practices to be studied and incorporated, when appropriate, into practice.
• the existing decision-making models used to determine whether or
not to incorporate new therapies and practices into conventional medicine,
including evidence thresholds.
• the applicability of these decision-making models to CAM therapies
and practices; that is, do they form good precedents for decisions relating to
regulation, accreditation, or integration of CAM therapies?
• identification and analysis of successful approaches to the incorpo-
ration of CAM into health professions education.
• the impact of current regulations and legislation on CAM research
and integration.
PREFACE ix
Committee membership was chosen to represent the most salient per-
spectives and competences, since there was no possibility that all or even
most of the interest groups could be represented. Members included provid-
ers of CAM and conventional health care as well as analysts, observers, and
managers of CAM and conventional health care systems. To ensure effec-
tive input from CAM providers, the committee established a working liai-
son group composed of 35 leaders of CAM and conventional medical disci-
plines and held a number of formal and informal interchanges with these
groups.
The committee proceeded to educate and inform itself through a sys-
tematic review of the extensive relevant literature, a series of expert presen-
tations, discussions, and public comments in open meetings, and focused
interchange and deliberation in committee meetings. The work of the com-
mittee was especially informed by discussions and a paper on experimental
design written for the committee by Naihua Duan, Joel Braslow, Alison
Hamilton Brown, Ted J. Kaptchuk, and Louise E. Tallen. The agendas and
participants in the public meetings are listed in Appendix G.
As described more extensively in Chapter 1 of the report, the commit-
tee deliberated at length concerning whether and how to define CAM most
usefully for the purpose of this report. All proposed definitions were impre-
cise, ambiguous, or otherwise subject to misinterpretation. Judging that a
definition was necessary, for the purposes of this report the committee
adopted the definition stated on page 19. Several important caveats need to
be understood to interpret correctly the committee’s meaning of statements
concerning CAM in this report. The definition is necessarily imprecise and
nonlimiting since it is based in part on the implied intended purpose of the
practitioner and the user (i.e., improvement of health outcomes) and in part
on exclusion from a category (the dominant health care system) that itself is
not precisely defined and that changes substantially over time.
The term CAM, as used in this report, encompasses a large, diverse,
and changing set of “systems, modalities, and practices and their theories
and beliefs.” The diversity of practice within CAM is so great that there are
few, if any, generalizations that apply equally to all systems, modalities,
and practices defined as CAM. When the term CAM is used in this report,
it is not intended to include all CAM practices equally but, rather, to refer
to a substantial group of CAM practices.
The work of the committee began with the question, what do patients
and health professionals need to know to make good decisions about the
use of health care interventions, including CAM? Of primary importance in
making decisions about whether to use specific CAM therapies is determin-
ing that they are safe and effective. There are extremes of belief about
effectiveness; for some individuals, no other evidence than hearsay or their