BALTIMORE — At one of the nation’s top trauma hospitals, a nurse circles a patient’s bed, humming and waving her arms as if shooing evil spirits. Another woman rubs a quartz bowl with a wand, making tunes that mix with the beeping monitors and hissing respirator keeping the man alive.
They are doing Reiki therapy, which claims to heal through invisible energy fields. The anesthesia chief, Dr. Richard Dutton, calls it “mystical mumbo jumbo.” Still, he’s a fan.
“It’s self-hypnosis” that can help patients relax, he said. “If you tell yourself you have less pain, you actually do have less pain.”
Alternative medicine has become mainstream. It is finding wider acceptance by doctors, insurers and hospitals such as the shock-trauma center at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
People turn to unconventional therapies and herbal remedies for everything from hot flashes and trouble sleeping to cancer and heart disease. They crave more “care” in their health care. They distrust drug companies and the government. They want natural, safer remedies.
But often, that is not what they get. Government actions and powerful interest groups have left consumers vulnerable to flawed products and misleading marketing.
An Associated Press review of dozens of studies and interviews with more than 100 sources found an underground medical system operating in plain sight, with a different standard than the rest of medical care and millions of people using it on blind faith.
Ten years ago, Congress created a federal agency to study supplements and unconventional therapies. But more than $2.5 billion of tax-financed research has not found any cures or major treatment advances, aside from certain uses for acupuncture and ginger for chemotherapy-related nausea.
If anything, evidence has mounted that many of these pills and therapies lack value.
Yet they are finding ever-wider use.More than a third of Americans use unconventional therapies, including acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and native or traditional healing methods. These practitioners are largely self-policing, with their own schools and accreditation groups.
