Alternative remedies

BALTIMORE — At one of the nation’s top trauma hospitals, a nurse circles a patient’s bed, humming and waving her arms as if shooing evil spirits. Another woman rubs a quartz bowl with a wand, making tunes that mix with the beeping monitors and hissing respirator.

They are doing Reiki therapy, which claims to heal through invisible energy fields. The anesthesia chief, Dr. Richard Dutton, calls it "mystical mumbo jumbo.” Still, he’s a fan.

"It’s self-hypnosis” that can help patients relax, he said. "If you tell yourself you have less pain, you actually do have less pain.”

Alternative medicine has become mainstream. It is finding wider acceptance by doctors, insurers and hospitals like the shock trauma center at the University of Maryland Medical Center.

But government actions and powerful interest groups have left consumers vulnerable to flawed products and misleading marketing.

Dietary supplements do not have to be proved safe or effective before they can be sold. Some contain natural things you might not want, such as lead and arsenic. Some interfere with other things you may be taking.

"Herbals are medicines,” with good and bad effects, said Bruce Silverglade of the consumer group Center for Science in the Public Interest.


Different standards
An Associated Press review of dozens of studies and interviews with more than 100 sources found an underground system operating in plain sight, with a different standard than the rest of medical care, and millions of people using it on blind faith.
Fifteen years ago, Congress decided to allow dietary and herbal supplements to be sold without federal Food and Drug Administration approval. The number of products soared from about 4,000 to well over 40,000 now.

"In testing, one out of four supplements has a problem,” said Dr. Tod Cooperman, president of ConsumerLab.com, an independent company that rates such products.

Mainstream medicine and prescription drugs have problems, too. But regulatory systems, guideline-setting groups and watchdog agencies help keep the industry in line.

The Federal Trade Commission is filing more complaints about deceptive marketing. One of the largest settlements occurred last August — $30 million from the makers of Airborne, a product marketed with an "invented by a teacher” slogan that claimed to ward off germs spread through the air.

People need to be skeptical of the term "natural,” said Kathy Allen, a dietitian at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla. Supplements lack proof of safety or benefit. Asked to take a drug under those terms, "most of us would say ‘no,’” she said. "When it says ‘natural,’ the perception is there is no harm. And that is just not true.”



by the associated press