Med School To Study Alternative Medicine

The study of herbs and non-traditional therapies such as acupuncture got a shot in the arm yesterday as Harvard Medical School (HMS) announced a $10 million gift to study non-traditional medicine.

The grant is a major boost for the HMS Division for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative Medicine, which is less than a year old.

The medical school plans to use some of the money to establish a new institute to study non-traditional medicine and set up a tenured professorship-the Bernard Osher Chair in Complementary and Integrative Medical Therapies.

The director of the division is Associate Professor of Medicine David M. Eisenberg `76, who became interested in non-traditional medicine as a young doctor on a trip to China.

For the past seven years, he has held conferences for practitioners of non-traditional medicine and physicians who want to learn more about it.

At a February conference, Eisenberg urged that more basic research be done into the efficacy and safety of herbal therapies and other non-traditional treatments.

"I think in the next years we'll see more basic science. This is necessary for the field to mature," he said at the time. "We need more definitive trials."

With the newest infusion of money, Eisenberg's division will be able to do more such research with its own resources.

Eisenberg is the author of a pair of landmark studies that show increases in the numbers of office visits and the amount of money spent on non-traditional practitioners in the 1990s.

Once considered outside the realm of western medicine, non-traditional therapies have gained popularity with the public and that popularity has put pressure on physicians to study their effects and possible drawbacks.

Dr. Joseph B. Martin, dean of HMS, said in a press release that a main purpose of research into non-traditional therapies is to determine which treatments are effective-and which have risks associated with them.

"We need to evaluate scientifically the effectiveness of these techniques-to assess the current status of our knowledge and determine what we need to do to advance that knowledge," said Martin.

The grant comes from the Bernard Osher Foundation, which was founded by Maine businessman Bernard Osher in 1977.

--Staff Writer Jonathan H. Esensten can be reached at esensten@fas.harvard.edu