Integrative Medicine Use Up, but Outcomes Still Uncertain

Not true. The outcome of money for nothing, or worse, is well-known.



BTW, the study is more than complete crap as it did not measure outcomes. It only measured the impressions of persons with vested interests on how well they felt they were doing.

In a survey of US medical centers using integrative medicine, 75% reported success using integrative practices to treat chronic pain, with more than half reporting positive results in the areas of gastrointestinal conditions, depression, anxiety, cancer, and chronic stress, according to a report released today by the Bravewell Collaborative.

The Bravewell Collaborative "support[s] the advancement of integrative medicine by creating and translating emerging knowledge into broad practice," according to its Web site. In the report, the collaborative defines integrative medicine as "an approach to care that puts the patient at the center and addresses the full range of physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual and environmental influences that affect a person's health."

The survey, Integrative Medicine in America: How Integrative Medicine Is Being Practiced in Clinical Centers Across the United States, involved 29 integrative medicine centers (9 of them in the Bravewell Clinical Network) at many leading medical institutions, including the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio; Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota; Stanford University in California; and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. These institutions provided a range of services including adult, geriatric, adolescent, obstetric-gynecologic, pediatric, and end-of-life care. The most frequently prescribed interventions, often in combination, were food and nutrition, supplements, yoga, meditation, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and acupuncture, massage, and pharmaceuticals.

Report coauthor Constance Pechura, PhD, senior advisor at the Bravewell Collaborative, said, during a telephone briefing on the release of the report that 29 centers were chosen from about 60 candidate integrative medicine centers (about 50 of them in an integrative medicine academic consortium). Coauthor Donald Abrams, MD, professor of clinical medicine and a consultant at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said the 29 centers were chosen based on their leadership, having been in operation for more than 3 years, having a significant patient volume, and having "contributed to the field." He told Medscape Medical News during the telephone briefing that, "[i]n fact, we were looking at some of the best centers, but I do think it's probably generalizable to certainly other centers in the academic consortium."

Conditions Treated With Best Success

During the briefing, Dr. Abrams said, "We were not measuring outcomes. We were asking the center directors and the clinical directors to give us their impressions of where they were having success."

Garbage