Clinical Trials: The Future of Complementary and Alternative Medicine

This issue of Avenues highlights the fact that there are a considerable number of resources for finding and enrolling in conventional medical clinical trials. The same is not true, however, for the field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Presently, there is no single comprehensive database for locating CAM trials, despite the fact that the total number of visits to CAM practitioners in the United States exceeds the total number of visits to all primary care physicians. (Eisenberg, Davis et al. 1998)

This is why, in keeping with our philosophy that better information can lead to better treatment outcomes, the Pine Street Foundation is launching a project to develop a comprehensive online database that will help visitors to our website quickly locate open CAM clinical trials.

To date, we have developed a database of over a hundred such trials and are adding dozens more every month. While information about some of these trials can be easy for patients to find on their own, such as on those trials sponsored by the National Cancer Institute or the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, information about trials conducted by private research foundations, university medical centers, and private industry groups is more decentralized and considerably more difficult to find. Our goal is to make all CAM clinical trials easy to learn about, locate, and contact.

To make this important new resource openly available at no charge to those who need it most, we need your help. To develop and maintain this database, we estimate it will cost approximately $17,000 because of the hundreds of hours of additional staff time that will be required. This cost estimate includes not only the development of the database itself but also the time it will take to maintain the resource by updating it regularly. We hope to be able to fund and launch this important service by March 1st of next year. Please donate now.

The future of CAM in the United States depends strongly on advancing the field through research. Only through well designed studies will there be broader acceptance and recognition of CAM, thus making it more widely available. The Pine Street Foundation seeks to contribute toward the future of CAM by expanding access to information about CAM clinical trials.

Reference:
Eisenberg, D. M., R. B. Davis, et al. (1998). "Trends in alternative medicine use in the United States, 1990-1997: results of a follow-up national survey." JAMA 280(18): 1569-75.

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