RT Book, Section
A1 Leskowitz, Eric
A2 Warfield, Carol A.
A2 Bajwa, Zahid H.
SR Print(0)
ID 3422222
T1 Chapter 77. Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Pain Management
T2 Principles & Practice of Pain Medicine, 2e
YR 2004
FD 2004
PB The McGraw-Hill Companies
PP New York, NY
SN 9780071443494
LK accessanesthesiology.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=3422222
RD 2024/04/24
AB Alternative  medicine  is  rapidly  growing  in  popularity.  In  what  may  eventually  prove  to  be  the  most  frequently  cited  medical  journal  article  in  the  postwar  era,  Eisenberg  and  colleagues  demonstrated  in  1993  that  nearly  40%  of  Americans  utilized  alternative  medical  therapies,  and  spent  more  out  of  pocket  for  these  approaches  than  they  spent  out  of  pocket  for  mainstream  medical  treatments.1  A  follow-up  study  in  1998  showed  continued  dramatic  growth  in  these  practices.2  The  National  Institutes  of  Health  (NIH)  has  supported  an  Office  of  Alternative  Medicine  since  1993,  but  thanks  to  steady  increases  in  congressional  funding,  it  was  recently  upgraded  to  a  division  within  the  NIH.  The  November  1998  issues  of  several  of  the  American  Medical  Association  (AMA)-sponsored  specialty  journals  were  devoted  to  the  topic  of  complementary  and  alternative  medicine  (commonly  abbreviated  CAM);  Micozzi’s  1996  text  on  alternative  medicine3  was  only  the  first  of  many.  This  rapid  rise  in  interest  to  what  was  previously  a  fringe  topic  lends  an  aura  of  novelty  to  these  techniques,  but  a  cursory  look  at  some  of  the  most  common  CAM  techniques  (acupuncture,  homeopathy,  yoga)  shows  that  these  are,  in  fact,  traditional,  if  not  ancient,  therapies.  And  so  it  should  not  be  surprising  that  the  most  common  symptom  that  brings  people  to  their  health  care  providers—pain—has  a  long  and  rich  tradition  of  CAM  interventions.  This  chapter  outlines  some  of  the  more  prominent  and  promising  CAM  approaches  to  pain  conditions,  both  acute  and  chronic,  at  the  same  time  that  it  outlines  some  fundamental  similarities  and  differences  between  CAM  and  mainstream  biomedical  therapies.