Alternative Medicine Under the Microscope (Part 1)

Alternative medicine has long been valued as an option to healing the body through unorthodox methods, herbs, oils, and meditation. The federal government has just stepped in to make sure alternative medicine is, in fact, all it claims to be: healthy and effective. Even though alternative medicine has been proven helpful in a variety of ailments and diseases, the government is now trying to make these methods rely on statistical numbers from their clinical trials in order to prove their success.

With more than 80 million adult alternative medicine subscribers in the United States alone, it makes sense to want to follow up these vast practices with costly amounts of scientific evidence. While some alternative medicine studies do use trials to track their results, a lot of these are lacking in structure and aren’t large enough to give accurate records.

The director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), part of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Josephine Briggs says that the focus on better standards are already making headway in new alternative research techniques, “The research has been making steady progress…it’s reasonably new that rigorous methods are being used to study these health practices.” To determine which trials are to get more money to create larger testing groups harboring more attention at the NCCAM, Dr. Briggs and her researchers are trying to spread out the $122 million this year evenly among those trials best suited for positive outcomes instead of investing in a lot of trials with a bigger possibility of a false positive reading which shines a poor light on alternative medicine.