Healing
Debate
As alternative medicine
treatment options grow,
skeptics remain
\\ By Matt Pilon
E
arlier this year, the American College
of Physicians, which provides medi-
cal treatment advice to its 148,000
member doctors and subspecialists
around the world, updated its decade-old guide-
lines for lower-back pain, adding acupuncture to
its list of recommended therapies to be tried
before prescribing any drugs.
What might sound like a bit of routine industry
news quickly became controversial.
At St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center, Dr.
Kathleen Mueller said she felt vindicated.
"is is a long time coming," said Mueller, medical
director of the St. Francis Center for Integrative
Medicine, a family physician and practitioner of
acupuncture and medical hypnosis. "Guidelines
are a very big deal. eir recommendations are
what insurers base what they pay on."
Some 42 miles to the south, the reaction from Dr.
Steven Novella, assistant professor of neurology at
the Yale School of Medicine, was the polar opposite.
"It was a big PR victory [for acupuncture],"
said Novella, a longtime critic of "alternative" and
"complementary" medicine. "But it was a scientific
catastrophe."
e dual reactions illustrate some of the friction
that has developed as alternative treatments like
acupuncture, reiki and homeopathy have become
more commonplace in hospitals.
Novella, executive editor of the website Science-
Based Medicine and a founder of the New England
Skeptical Society, has written about alternative
therapies for years, analyzing and picking apart
medical studies, oen criticizing their designs
as less than rigorous. He has concluded that
Christopher Gaunya,
an acupuncturist at
St. Francis Hospital
and Medical Center,
treats patient Alisa
Smith of Ellington.
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