Chinese, U.S. Medical Leaders Discuss "Alternative Medicine"

In the largest ever gathering of Chinese and U.S. medical leaders, participants argued for greater international cooperation and a convergence of Western and Eastern medicine during a six-day conference hosted by the Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

With the goal of beginning “to consider common solutions to shared problems,” the conference drew more than 600 Chinese health care leaders and government officials as well as hundreds of American medical experts to MIT.

Nelson Y. Kiang, conference chair and HMS professor of physiology emeritus, characterized Harvard’s conservative medical institution as particularly “hostile” to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)—practices not commonly taught at medical schools or widely available in U.S. hospitals but widely available and trusted in China.

Despite popular interest, only recently has the American medical establishment itself begun to study the benefits of CAM and its possible interactions with prescription medicine, speakers said.

In fact, speakers explained that Western medicine threatened the health of patients by not matching the increasing demand for CAM with greater study and education for doctors.

David M. Eisenberg ’76, director of the HMS Division for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative Medicine Therapies, called for a “critical mass” of international medical talent to add intellectual momentum to validate CAM.

Eisenberg, who studied traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) while a medical exchange student in China in 1979, expressed great respect for TCM, and outlined the brief decade-old CAM movement in the U.S., contrasting it with the nearly 4,000-year-old history of TCM.

“TCM offers a different frame of reference for looking at the human body and allows us to deconstruct diseases through another lens,” Eisenberg said.

In the early 1990s, the U.S. Senate coined the term “alternative medicine,” and the National Institutes of Health established the Office of Alternative Medicine after studies revealed that one-third of adults in the U.S. were routinely seeking CAM treatments, including acupuncture, massage, self help, and herbal remedies.

Eisenberg also cited findings that between 1990 and 1997, Americans made 629 million visits to CAM practitioners and only 400 million visits to primary care physicians. During that time, patients paid $27 billion for CAM treatments not covered by insurance.

He said that greater cooperation between Eastern and Western doctors was necessary to understanding the interactions between CAM and prescription drugs.

For instance, one study found that the popular herbal remedy St. John’s Wort nullified the protective benefit of the drug “cocktail” designed to fight AIDS.

Concluding his lecture with a motivational Chinese aphorism, Eisenberg asked the American and Chinese audience to “honor” the vast knowledge embedded in traditional Chinese therapies.

While American medicine has been hostile to TCM, some Chinese are equally hostile to Western medical science. During a question-and-answer session, one Chinese journalist challenged the feasibility of sharing knowledge and questioned the need to validate TCM with Western standards.

With an analogy comparing Chinese and Western approaches to a “wild duck and a chicken,” he concluded that no one should expect the two medical cultures to communicate.

Liu Baoyan, the vice president of the Chinese Academy of TCM, explained that both cultures could learn from each other.

Che Hung Leong, the president of the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine, emphasized the “parallel status” of TCM and Western medicine and noted the awkwardness of dubbing mainstream Chinese medical practices as “alternative.”

He noted that many of the finest practitioners of TCM were first trained in Western medical schools and he also advocated teaching TCM to Western doctors.

Leong also questioned how the two approaches should be integrated without overloading medical students with both Western and Eastern medical knowledge.

Both Leong and Eisenberg remarked that exceptional scientific data alone—not consumer demand or politics—would lead to CAM’s acceptance in the Western medical community.