Alternative Medicine: 7 Things Providers Want You to Know

Complementary and alternative medicine, sometimes called CAM, encompasses a wide range of treatments. Physicians who use both traditional approaches and CAM often refer to their practices as ‘integrative’ or ‘holistic.’ No matter what you call it, its popularity in the United States has grown rapidly over the past 40 or 50 years. Here’s what some providers say about their experience using CAM to treat patients.

“Conventional medicine has done a great job treating certain things: acute infections, trauma, etcetera, but [for] a lot of chronic conditions—chronic pain for example—conventional medicine has not come up with a lot of great solutions. These [other] kinds of approaches can add a much bigger toolbox to approaching challenging conditions,” says Ben Kligler, MD, professor of Family and Community Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Most complementary or alternative medicine therapies fall into categories. “Things people take—supplements and botanicals; who people see—like chiropractors, massage therapists, and naturopaths; and things people do—that might be prayer for healing, yoga or mindfulness, for example. Each one of those categories has their own risks and benefits,” says Amy B. Locke, MD, University of Utah Resiliency Center, University of Utah Health in Salt Lake City. “If people are looking for a provider, they’re going to have to do some legwork. Find someone who’s been [practicing] a while, somebody whose patients are crazy about them—who’s been very well trained in their field,” adds Harold Goodman, DO and surgeon in Silver Spring, Maryland who is also a homeopath and acupuncturist.

As public interest in CAM grew, physicians and researchers began to study them more closely. “For the treatment of certain pain conditions—low back pain, neck pain, headache, osteoarthritis—the evidence is at least as strong as the evidence for almost any conventional medication we use. The American College of Physicians recently put out guidelines on low back pain that included several evidence-based complementary therapies. That kind of thing wasn’t happening 10 years ago,” says Dr. Kligler. Research continues into many types of CAM.

“People need to be listened to,” says Dr. Goodman. “I’m a licensed, fully trained physician-surgeon and I believe in offering whatever I can to support the patient.” For a recent patient, “I used the regular protocol that any well-trained physician would use, and I also gave him a homeopathic medicine that could reverse everything that’s going on in the system. I did those two things and then gave him an osteopathic treatment to get the immune system functioning better,” Goodman adds.

“Hypnotherapy has great potential, not for treating everything under the sun, but for treating certain conditions,” says Dr. Kligler, who has used it for phobias and insomnia. As for practices like yoga, tai chi, or meditation, “all of those have great potential for helping. With a lot of different therapies, the biggest concentration of evidence for those things is in pain and mental health conditions,” Kligler adds.

“The idea behind integrative medicine is to consider what the patient needs rather than ‘these are the therapies everybody gets.’ There is a misconception that everything we do in conventional medicine has been proven without a shadow of a doubt, and that is not true. Much of what we do in conventional medicine is based on our experience—what we’ve seen [first-hand], or studies [from other providers]. You can’t suspend that [process] when you switch to thinking about yoga or massage or particular products. So, you have to help the person make a decision based on the evidence that’s available and the risk of harm,” says Dr. Locke.

“If you’re looking for a provider and they are trying to sell something, that’s a red flag. If you’re talking with a provider and there’s only ‘one right way,’ that’s another big red flag,” says Dr. Locke. “People with cancer or other serious medical conditions should be especially careful in researching and choosing the practitioners they work with, as there are unfortunately many ineffective and potentially dangerous alternative approaches being offered which can do much more harm than good,” adds Dr. Kligler. Whether it’s yoga, herbal medicine, energy work, or homeopathy, be sure to tell your provider what you’re doing or taking.