Geffen Faculty Highlight Concerns Linking CAIM and Conventional Researchers at UCLA Symposium

Elizabeth H Logue

doi:10.1093/ecam/nen051

Abstract

David Geffen School of Medicine faculty, representing a wide range of disciplines, engaged speakers nationally known for their expertise on complementary, alternative and integrative medicine (CAIM) and its investigation at a January, 2008 symposium on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. The forum was created to educate the UCLA Institutional Review Board (IRB), and lively participation by School of Medicine faculty helped bring IRB members up to speed on controversies surrounding CAIM research. The symposium demonstrated that academics who are neither proponents nor detractors of CAIM can facilitate cross talk between opposing camps, elucidating questions important to its evaluation by those charged with protecting research subjects. It also brought attention to the universality of quandaries facing CAIM investigators and to the ingenuity with which they have addressed many of them.

Highlights

Some panelists homed in on the role played by politics in the evolution of National Institutes of Health (NIH) Centers
While the randomized trial has played an important role, not least in providing an impersonal method of assessment for modern, bureaucratic medicine [3], its pre-eminent position has come into question. This occurs as complexity science yields tools better able to capture the effects of actual medical practice
One UCLA panelist suggested that a natural ‘winnowing’ process would succeed in identifying therapies of real value

Summary

Introduction

Some panelists homed in on the role played by politics in the evolution of National Institutes of Health (NIH) Centers. While the randomized trial has played an important role, not least in providing an impersonal method of assessment for modern, bureaucratic medicine [3], its pre-eminent position has come into question.

Results

Conclusion