A Walk in The Wild

"When my aunt had cancer, a lot of the treatments she took were CAM," said Roger Alvarez, 23, who came to the Georgetown program with a degree in biology from the University of Miami. "Her oncologist . . . was clueless" about the remedies she was taking on her own.

Andy Jou, also 23, often encountered similar ignorance during the year he worked in a Champaign, Ill., emergency room after graduating from the University of Illinois in 2002.

"Every time someone came to the ER, we had to surf the Web" for information on the herbal medicines and dietary supplements the patient reported taking. The situation left Jou confused and concerned: "What do we do if we don't know what the interactions will be?"

A Federal Matter

In 2001, Georgetown's medical school received a $1.7 million federal grant to integrate CAM into its curriculum. The master's program is an offshoot of that grant, which came from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), part of the National Institutes of Health. The program was developed in large part as a revenue builder: The $23,000 annual tuition of the 20 hoped-for students will help maintain the larger CAM program after the five-year grant ends.

"Virtually all medical schools recognize that they need to grapple with CAM," said Aviad Haramati, a Georgetown professor of medicine and director of the medical school's CAM initiative. Seventy-five to 90 percent of medical schools, he said, do have some basic CAM courses. But they are frequently segregated from the rest of the curriculum and offered as electives.

That, he said, is not good enough. "We have to ask what does every student need to know, not what do some students want to know," and integrate those essentials into the curriculum.

"Georgetown is correct and exemplifying a trend across the nation," said David Eisenberg, director of Harvard Medical School's Osher Institute and chief of the school's division of research and education in complementary and integrative medicine.

While Harvard's month-long course in CAM is an elective, aspects of CAM have been introduced into certain required courses. For example, herbs are now studied in pharmacology classes. Of the 120 medical schools in the United States, said Eisenberg, "at a minimum, 20 schools are [integrating CAM] proactively. . . . That's what we'll be seeing over the next decade."

Quack Attack

This increase in the academic is not universally welcomed.

"We're off to the races with something that hasn't been conceptualized as a discipline. It's a hodgepodge of quackery taken to a new level," said Robert Baratz, president of the National Council Against Health Fraud.