A Walk in The Wild

Baratz, a practicing physician in the Boston area, deplores what he believes is the squandering of research dollars on studying CAM. He also disputes the statistics claiming large numbers of CAM users -- statistics that are often cited to defend the need to study CAM.

According to an NCCAM survey published in May, more than 60 percent of Americans use some form of CAM. That figure, however, drops by almost half when prayer is excluded.

"Lots of people pray," Baratz said, "but [NCCAM] calls it CAM. . . . We call it SCAM."

Joseph J. Fins, director of medical ethics at Cornell Medical School, shares Baratz's concerns about CAM statistics.

"A lack of demographic knowledge has contributed to a disproportionate interest in the field . . . given other funding priorities," said Fins, who was a member of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy.

In fact, he said, the most commonly used statistics showing great numbers of visits to CAM practitioners misrepresent the reality. He cites a 2002 Archives of Internal Medicine report that concluded that around 9 percent of the U.S. adult population accounted for more than 75 percent of the 629 million annual visits to CAM providers. "A small minority [of CAM users] accounts for the majority of expenditures," Fins said.

And prayer? "Questions of faith and healing should not be the purview of science. And it degrades prayer to try to define it in a way it wasn't meant to be defined."

Unlike Baratz, Fins supports some integration of CAM into the medical curriculum. After all, a doctor needs to know enough about supplements and other therapies to know when they may do more harm than good. For example, an HIV-positive patient taking protease inhibitors should be told not to take the herb St. John's wort -- sometimes used to treat depression -- which decreases the AIDS drug's effectiveness.

But the doctor's office and the laboratory are worlds apart, and for Fins the question is whether CAM's efficacy be measured objectively.

Fugh-Berman said part of the problem is getting medical professionals acquainted with the high-quality research that has already been done, much of it in other countries.