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disease. Where convention fails to provide a diagnosis, Chinese medi-
cine might. And with diagnosis comes hope of a cure.
As CAM has become more popular, so more money is being de-
voted to studying it. The US National Institute of Health, for example,
invests nearly $90million a year in the National Centre for Comple-
mentary and Alternative Medicine. The Centre’s brief is wide-ranging.
As well as more accepted therapies such as herbal medicines, it covers
what it describes as frontier medicine; including magnets and energy
healing on the grounds that the public is using them, so they need to
be investigated.
Safety is one of the main preoccupations of research into CAM. If
people are going to use it, we need to be sure it’s safe. But the other
question everyone wants to be answered is: do CAM therapies work?
Scientific studies have produced patchy results. But these investiga-
tions also pose real puzzles for researchers steeped in conventional
medical science. They imply that the assumptions underlying modern
clinical research do not apply to CAM – researchers need to refine
their thinking.
Take the gold standard in clinical research – the double-blind pla-
cebo-controlled trial. When a pharmacist company develops a new
drug, it gives it to half a group of patients, while the other half re-
ceives an identical-looking dummy pill. Even the doctors don’t know
who gets what. Researchers do this because they know the placebo is
a potent healer in its own right. Much effort has gone into identifying
the biochemicals that mediate this effect. And scientists have recently
found that acupuncture stimulates those same biochemical pathways.
The dummy pill is clinical science’s only concession to the place-
bo effect, perhaps because it is the drug and not the doctor that is seen
as the main agent of healing. Yet we know that the attitude of the doc-
tor is also important. Doctors who are friendly, informal and reassur-
ing are more effective healers. How much more important is this ef-
fect in CAM, where therapists set great store by their contact with pa-
tients?
The key to alternative healing may be the degree of personal at-
tention, interest, and time which healers give their clients, and this
may be what conventional medicine is missing. The growing populari-
ty of alternative medicine is therefore a reminder to everyone involved