Published by: World Tibet Network News, Sunday, Jun 09, 1996

BETHESDA, Md., June 7 (UPI) -- A government-sponsored blue ribbon panel recommended Friday that medical and nursing schools need to start teaching about alternative medicine.

More than a third of Americans regularly use a non-mainstream therapy, such as acupuncture or vitamin treatments, and traditional doctors and nurses need to know more about these practices, said experts at a conference convened by the National Institutes of Health's Office of Alternative Medicine and Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

"One of the main reasons is to provide good care and to protect the public from bad practices," said Dr. Wayne Jonas, director of NIH's Office of Alternative Medicine.

Other groups besides the blue ribbon panel have called for medical schools to open up, but this gathering of government, military and academic educators brought considerable prestige to the recommendations.

"I think this is the first time that it's happened this way," Jonas said.

Congress set up the office he directs in 1992 to help evaluate the rainbow of therapies outside the mainstream of medical research. Jonas and the office use the term "complementary medicine," and the list of practices they use to sort grant applications includes yoga, biofeedback, hypnotherapy, acupuncture, shamanism, chiropractic medicine, Tibetan medicine, macrobiotics and past life therapy among many others.

These kinds of therapies drew $10 billion out of American pockets in 1990, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

With "$10 billion to $14 billion dollars being spent on alternative medicine, our students -- all of medicine -- need to know about it," Dr. James Zimble, president of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda.

He warned conference members of the hard realities of trying to redirect medical school courses. "Changing a medical school curriculum is a little more difficult than re-siting Arlington Cemetery," Zimble said. His remark started a debate about which process involved more dead bodies.

Once Zimble got the conversation back on track, he explained that medical schools feel great pressure to cram a lot of information into their students' school years. "We give them a fire hose of knowledge they have to drink from," he said.

Zimble acknowledged that people often expect military medicine to be especially resistant to alternative approaches, but he maintained that was not the case. Despite the pressure, the Uniformed Services school already added for-credit seminars on such topics as "Chinese Herbal Medicine and Diet" plus clinics and other programs to expose students to alternative medicine.

Jonas estimated about 40 other schools around the country have developed courses on the topic. Harvard has offered "Alternative Medicine: Implications for Clinical Practice and Research" as well as "Medical Hypnosis and Behavioral Therapy." Stanford taught "Alternative Medicine: A Scientific View," and Johns Hopkins has offered "The Philosophy and Practice of Healing."

(Written by UPI Science Writer Susan Milius in Washington)