Assessing the Effectiveness of Complementary & Alternative Medicine

This publication is one in a series of educational resource materials on complementary and alternative health care issues published by the and is thus in the public domain; it may be quoted freely with proper credit. Please cite as follows: Curtis, PC. This series responds to the many questions raised as conventional health care practitioners encounter widespread and increasing use of complementary and alternative therapies. Each publication in the series highlights one or more of the key issues facing health professionals today— including assessing information, safety, effectiveness , and the integration of conventional , complementary, and alternative health care. Assessing the Effectiveness of Complementary & Alternative Medicine examines the issues raised when conventional health care practitioners seek to answer the deceptively simple question: " Do complementary and alternative therapies work? " Responding to that question requires an understanding of different healing paradigms, measurement techniques, and sources of information. Alternative Medicine foreword T he widespread use of complementary and alternative medicine by over 40 percent of the U.S. population (Eisenberg, et al., 1998) presents the conventional health care practitioner with a considerable challenge: How to assess the effectiveness of a wide variety of therapies and treatments that are largely unfamiliar. The difficulty arises because the simple question— Does it work?—often does not have a simple answer. To fully answer that question, it is first necessary to appreciate the different healing approaches of conventional medicine and many complementary and alternative therapies, and to understand how these differences affect treatment approaches and measurement of outcomes. Additionally, one must understand how conventional research methodologies and evidence reporting limit or conflict with the ability to accurately assess complementary and alternative therapies' effectiveness. Finally, one must know where to find reliable information about the effectiveness of such therapies. This publication explores the issues raised when techniques for measuring efficacy in conventional medicine are applied to the measurement of effectiveness in the clinical setting of a complementary/alternative medical practice. In particular, readers are invited to: