Alternative Care Gets Less Fringey

“The average amount of time [therapists] spend with a patient is 30 minutes, which is a luxury,” she says. “They have an opportunity to develop a relationship, which unfortunately doctors and nurses can’t do, because the tasks around care have depleted their ability to do that.”

But demand for “touchy-feely” care is not the only reason mainstream doctors are integrating alternative therapies into their practices, Mayo’s Bauer says. Doctors are also realizing that patients can endanger their health by embarking on alternative therapies alone.

“Let’s say you’re taking 24 herbs. I need someone who can go over the interactions they might have with other drugs,” Bauer explains. St. John’s wort, for example, is commonly used by people to treat mild depression, but it can interfere with drugs that prevent the body from rejecting a heart transplant.

How Do We Measure Ki?

Does complementary and alternative medicine work? George believes it does. Two years ago, he suffered pain and nausea for 48 hours after having urological surgery. But last August, in preparation for surgery that would remove an abnormal skin growth in his middle ear, Abbott staff used relaxation therapies to help him through a short delay.

“Normally, that kind of delay would make me quite uptight,” George says. Guided imagery, in which a trained nurse-clinician led him through an imagined sequence of soothing images, relaxed him. So did healing touch, in which the practitioner’s hands moved several inches above his body, most of the time not actually touching him. After surgery, George had more healing-touch therapy and acupuncture. “I had no pain or nausea to the anesthesia this time,” he says. “And no codeine, morphine, or even two Tylenol.”

Then last April, when he had surgery on an elbow, he requested healing touch and guided imagery again, and experienced the same results. “They make infinitely good sense,” George says of the therapies. “Of course it might be different for each person, but I look at the overall picture—how long did it take me to heal, and how well did it work?”

But those are the kinds of questions science is still trying to answer regarding many complementary therapies: how, and how well, do they actually work? Acupuncture, for instance, has a well-established body of efficacy, Bauer says. But he acknowledges that it’s been tough to come up with double-blind trials in which patients would be unable to tell whether they received a real needle stick or not. And Western medicine is still not able to verify the existence of energy fields (called variously chi, ki, or qi) that Eastern practitioners believe they can influence through therapies such as acupuncture or qi gong, a Chinese practice of movement and meditation similar to tai chi and similarly meant to improve the flow of healing energies through the body.

As George says about healing touch, even though he’s read extensively about the practice, “I’m still not sure what it is, but it worked for me.”

Bauer believes that alternative treatments need to stand up to Western-style scientific study before we can have confidence about whether and how they work. At the same time, he says, patients and doctors need to acknowledge that some practices that have become standard in Western medicine don’t hold up very well under the scrutiny of researchers. Studies have proved, for example, that arthroscopic surgery on arthritic knees is no better than a placebo procedure, he says. Likewise, having drainage tubes placed in your ears (something both of my sisters endured as kids) doesn’t prevent or ease ear infections as doctors once believed it did.

“There are a lot of things we do in conventional medicine just because we’ve always done them,” Bauer says. “Neither side has a lock on the truth.”