1971 New York Times columnist James Reston brings the concept of acupuncture and Chinese herbs to America's shores.
1983 The Alternative Health Plan is established in California by Steve and Sherry Gorman. The company's goal is to provide medical plans offering freedom of choice and including coverage for alternative and complementary medicine such as acupuncture, massage, and herbal remedies.
1986 The Oriental Medical Center in Los Angeles studies the efficacy of Chinese herbs and acupuncture in treating ARC and AIDS.
1992 The nation's first federally funded alternative medicine HIV public health clinic project gets underway in San Francisco.
The Office of Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, is created by Congress. This is the first federal agency focusing on alternative treatments.
1993 Harvard University researcher Dr. David Eisenberg releases findings in the New England Journal of Medicine on Americans' use of alternative therapies. This landmark study reports that one in three Americans used at least one form of unconventional therapy.
American Western Life Insurance Company offers its first wellness plan, which promotes self-care and reimbursements for visits to alternative practitioners.
1994 A Gallup poll finds that 17 percent of Americans use herbal supplements, a 14 percent increase over the previous year.
The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act is passed by Congress, deregulating herbal remedies.
The first two specialty research centers—Bastyr University AIDS Research Center, Seattle, and Minneapolis Medical Research Center for Addictions Study—are established by the NIH to study the effects of alternative therapies.
Health insurance giant Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Washington and Alaska launches a yearlong pilot program, Alterna Path, which provides coverage for alternative treatments.
1995 Kaiser Permanente, the country's largest health maintenance organization, opens the doors of its first alternative medicine clinic in Vallejo, California.
Harvard Medical School hosts the first-of-its-kind mind/body conference for doctors, who can receive continuing education credits for attending.
Eight specialty research centers have now joined the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine in its efforts to study alternative medicine.
The State of Washington passes a law requiring all insurance companies to cover the services of licensed alternative practitioners.
1996 The State of Oregon follows Washington's lead and presents voters with the Healthcare Freedom Initiative, a plan similar to that of Washington State, but it fails at the polls because of a technicality.
The first-of-its-kind nationwide study of patient perceptions of Chinese medicine treatments is conducted under the direction of the Traditional Acupuncture Institute in Columbia, Maryland.
The first clinical study of the effects of the Chinese herb dong quai on postmenopausal women is conducted by Kaiser Permanente's Division of Research. A record number of volunteers express interest in participating.
Acupuncture needles are removed from the FDA's list of investigational devices, making them accepted treatment devices, no longer considered experimental.
One of the first undergraduate courses in unconventional medicine is offered at the University of California, Davis.
The Asian Diet Pyramid is released.
1997 National Institutes of Health Office of Alternative Medicine and the Office of Dietary Supplements are collaborating to fund research on the benefits of the herb commonly known as St. John's Wort as a potential treatment for depression.
National Institutes of Health panel endorses acupuncture therapy as an effective treatment for certain types of pain, nausea, as a surgical anesthesia, for pregnancy, and to relieve the side effects of chemotherapy. The panel also says that there is evidence that acupuncture may be effective for menstrual cramps, tennis elbow, drug addiction, stroke, and fibromyalgia.
Teaching Alternative Treatments at
Traditional Medical Schools
Eastern applications and Western alternatives have been quietly creeping into the mainstream Western medical practices. Hospitals around the country now offer some form of alternative (the term used to define anything unproven in Western medical terms) choice for patients. Western medical schools are adding integrative medicine courses, for example, blending Chinese medicine with Western therapies, to their once conservative curricula. Therapies until recently considered offbeat and unproven—such as acupuncture, meditation, herbology, energy balancing, spirituality, and various cultural traditions—now complement traditional training. Conservative Columbia University has created the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Center for Alternative/Complementary Medicine. Harvard Medical School offers students an intensive course on alternative medical practices.
According to information from the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, there are more than twenty-six prominent medical schools now offering courses in alternative medicine. Yale School of Medicine, Temple University, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Columbia University College of Physicians, Emory University School of Medicine, and the University of Virginia Medical School are among them.
FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
The University of Arizona College of Medicine developed the nation's first postgraduate fellowship program in integrative medicine. Under the direction of best-selling author Dr. Andrew Weil, the Arizona program accepts board-certified physicians to a course of study that includes acupuncture, herbology, visualization, mind/body techniques, Chinese medicine, and Native American medicine, to name a few. According to materials developed for the program, it was created in response to a growing demand from physicians for instruction in alternative healing practices.
"It is anticipated that this pioneer program in integrative medicine will help document which of the alternative medical approaches to include in standard allopathic practice.... I am personally convinced that many of the interventions studied and used in this innovative program will find their way into future daily allopathic practice. At that time, the term alternative will no longer be appropriate for these techniques and agents. Indeed they will have become mainstream therapy."13
—Joseph S. Alpert, M.D., head of the Department
of Medicine, Arizona Health Sciences Center,
University of Arizona College of Medicine
Goals of the University of Arizona Program in Integrative Medicine
• To train doctors to combine the best ideas and practices of conventional and alternative medicine into new cost-effective treatments.
• To encourage doctors to research theories and methods of alternative systems of treatment.
• To encourage doctors to be role models of healthy living.
• To provide integrative medical care for a selected group of patients coming to the university health center.
• To develop a model of training that can be used by other medical institutions.
• To produce leaders for this new discipline of medicine who will establish similar programs at other institutions and set policy and direction for health care in the twenty-first century.14
HEALING OPTIONS COURSE AT