Alternative medicine is gaining acceptance, but dangers remain

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SHARI ROANLos Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES - So-called complementary and alternative medicines have gained a foothold in today's medical world, garnering grudging respect from many mainstream physicians and researchers.
Medical centers such as the University of California, Los Angeles, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York have created integrative programs, and medical schools increasingly offer courses in the field of alternative medicine.
Several peer-reviewed journals are now devoted to the subject. In 1998, Congress established the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine to conduct research on promising and popular therapies.
"Complementary" means unorthodox therapies used in conjunction with conventional medicine, while "alternative" means therapies used in place of conventional treatment.
But with this measure of legitimacy has come a rise in unprofessional, even fraudulent, practitioners. Using the Internet and word of mouth to promote their services - and nuggets of science to defend their treatments - these peddlers of unproven cures offer hope to desperately sick people in imaginative new ways.
Some fatally ill patients forgo traditional care; others burn through their savings. Diagnosed with ovarian cancer, the late Coretta Scott King sought care at a Mexican clinic, Santa Monica Health Institute. She died there, and it was shut down by Mexican health authorities.
Many such patients merge conventional care with alternative practices without telling their doctors, thus risking dangerous side effects or drug interactions.
"People who know the field well think that many cancer patients are harming themselves by engaging in dubious practices," says Andrew Vickers, a research methodologist at Sloan-Kettering who has studied alternative medicine.
An estimated 80 percent of all cancer patients in the United States use some type of unorthodox therapy, according to a 2002 survey by the business research firm Datamonitor.
The worldwide market for complementary and alternative medicines for cancer patients could be as high as $18 billion, the research firm says.
Today, says Dr. Wallace Sampson, clinical professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford University, no treatments can be called bad, only "unproven."
Sampson edits the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, a journal exploring the scientific validity of complementary and alternative treatments.
Proponents of unorthodox medicine have been quite successful at changing the language and the playing field, he says.
"What we used to regard as illegal, immoral and unethical is now regarded as just a different way of thinking."
But Erica McLean maintains that she and her late husband Clive, who died of cancer, were duped.
"When you're dealing with something like this, you can believe anything and anybody," she says. "We were so pulled by the promise of a cure. It was a betrayal."
Experiences such as those McLean describes are thought to be common, although few cases of suspected fraud are reported and prosecuted.
With many alternative practitioners unlicensed and unregulated by medical boards or state agencies, there is little recourse for consumers except to file a complaint with local law enforcement agencies. But, experts say, those agencies' resources for identifying health fraud are thin.