Alternative treatments for health care

Posted by DAAN on October 7, 2007 under Acupuncture, General |

There are many different types of alternative treatments. According to this article, acupuncture is particularly good for pain and post surgical nausea:

” Americans spend billions of dollars each year on alternative medicine, everything from chiropractic care to hypnosis.

Weil says alternative medicine can work wonders — acupuncture, certain herbs, guided imagery.

For example, Dr. Brian Berman, director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, has done a series of studies showing acupuncture’s benefits for osteoarthritis of the knee.

Extensive studies have also been done on mind-body approaches such as guided imagery, and on some herbs, including St. John’s wort.

But on the other hand, there also is a lot of quackery out there, Weil says. “I’ve seen it all, [including] products that claim to increase sexual vigor, cure cancer and allay financial anxiety.”

So how do you know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to alternative medicine? Just a decade ago, there weren’t many well-done, independent studies on herbs, acupuncture, massage or hypnosis, so patients didn’t have many facts to guide them.

But in 1999, eight academic medical centers, including Harvard, Duke and Stanford, banded together with the purpose of encouraging research and education on alternative medicine. Eight years later, the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine has 38 member universities, and has gathered evidence about what practices have solid science behind them.

Here, from experts at five of those universities, are five alternative medicine practices that are among the most promising because they have solid science behind them.

1. Acupuncture for pain

Hands, down, this was the No. 1 recommendation from our panel of experts. They also recommended acupuncture for other problems, including nausea after surgery and chemotherapy.”