Doing what comes ‘naturally’

Abstract

The chances are that you, or someone close to you, uses a form of complementary medicine or alternative therapy. The extraordinary growth in the popularity of such approaches raises the question of why they tend to receive only scant coverage in TiPS and related titles. This neglect has mainly been due to the paucity of research reports on these topics appearing in the mainstream journals. But now one institution is aiming to change that situation. In a packed Symposium at last month's Experimental Biology Meeting in Orlando, Stephen Straus, Director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), issued a call to arms to biomedical researchers. NCCAM is already funding several research centres and multicentre trials, but with a research allocation of $89.1 m for 2001, Straus emphasized their desire to see more proposals. US Government funding for research on these topics has increased 50-fold in the past decade. In addition to distributing these new research funds, NCCAM is spearheading changes such as the inclusion, from February, of articles relating to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) on PubMed. Next on the agenda is the thorny issue of how to raise industrial interest in backing CAM research, given the lack of market incentives. An NCCAM-sponsored Colloquium on the topic, to be held on 14 May 2001 in Washington DC, should at least get the interested parties talking. AS