New $10M grant boosts alternative medicine studies

http://www.mddailyrecord.com/pub/5_397_thursday/businessnews/172860-1.html

By KAREN BUCKELEW DAILY RECORD BUSINESS WRITER
Under a new, $10 million federal grant, the University of Maryland Center for Integrative Medicine is forming two new centers to study increasingly popular Eastern therapies.

Photo by Sonja Kinzer
The center, now in its 14th year of studying alternative therapies with a focus on Chinese medicine, will use the grants from the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine to continue its investigation of acupuncture and herbal medicine in pain relief, and to form an international collaboration with Chinese scientists to examine use of the methods in treating bowel disorders.
“We know that people are using these therapies,” said the center’s director, Dr. Brian Berman. “We as an institution want to make sure what patients are doing is safe and effective, and can even complement what we can do with standard care.”
Studies show at least half of Americans are using complementary alternative medicine, he added.
A grant for nearly $6 million is going to the formation of a Center of Excellence for Arthritis and Traditional Chinese Medicine Research within the center, to conduct a clinical trial on the effectiveness of a Chinese herbal formula called HLXL in treating osteoarthritis of the knee.
That center also will expand on a previous, 570-patient clinical trial university investigators completed last year that examined use of acupuncture in osteoarthritis of the knee. That study found acupuncture reduced pain for a significant number of patients compared to a placebo therapy.
Researchers now will probe the reasons acupuncture is effective, including the neurochemicals it stimulates to release in the brain, Berman said.
A second, $4 million, grant will create the International Center for Research on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, led by the university and including Chinese University in Hong Kong, the University of Illinois and the University of Western Sydney in Australia.
The international effort will study the effectiveness of herbal therapies and acupuncture compared to standard methods of care in each country in the treatment of bowel disorders, such as irritable bowel syndrome.
The grant funds six new studies altogether, three per center, to add to the Center for Integrative Medicine’s 18 to 20 current studies of alternative therapies, said Berman.
“We don’t have all the answers with just our standard methods of care,” Berman, a specialist in family medicine, said. “We need to find out if there are other options with traditional Chinese medicine or other methods.”
He said alternative treatments continue to grow in popularity for a number of reasons, among them the rising expense of prescription drugs. In the case of arthritis and other chronic pain conditions, he said, there have been concerns about the safety of pain-relieving drugs such as Vioxx.
“And,” Berman added, “people also want ways that they can help themselves, to add some of their own control over their own health.”
Officials at the Tai Sophia Institute, a Laurel-based school that educates about 350 students at any one time on topics like acupuncture and herbal medicine, said Western medical studies of Eastern therapies are encouraging. However, to them, the centuries-old therapies have been proven time and again.
“The odd thing about this is acupuncture and herbal medicines are the oldest forms of healing on the planet,” said Tai Sophia President and co-founder Robert M. Duggan. “The most primitive of people used food and herbs to heal themselves.”
“What Brian and his colleagues are doing is this scientific research documenting that, explaining in Western scientific terms the why and the how,” he added. “That’s an extraordinary complement to this institute, where we’re training people to carry on these traditions.”
Still, Duggan said, such studies often are in extremely controlled environments, while true acupuncture is used in conjunction with other factors like lifestyle changes and yoga.
Acupuncture supporters, he said, would like to see federal funding for data collection among clients at institutes like Tai Sophia, where 35,000 acupuncture treatments are administered each year in concert with other therapies.
“We know there’s a lot of data there, but we’ve never had the funds to find out what effects patients are reporting,” said Duggan.