BACKGROUND As complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has developed extensively, uncertainty about the appropriateness of the terms CAM and other CAM-related terms has grown both in the research and practice communities. Various terms and definitions have been proposed over the last three decades, highlighting how little agreement exits in the field. Contextual use of current terms and the...

Over one-third of Americans use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). The prevalence among cancer patients may even be higher. Complementary therapies may reduce possible symptom burdens caused by conventional cancer treatments. Integrating CAM therapies has become more common and more accepted in clinical oncology. However, little research is available on beneficial CAM therapies for r...

The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), including the ingestion of natural health products (NHPs), is common among cancer patients. Of concern to clinicians and patients alike is the possibility that CAM, used concurrently with biomedical therapy, may interact poorly with that therapy, especially chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Proponents of NHPs argue that taking such products ...

BACKGROUND Recently, numerous studies have revealed an increase in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use in US civilian populations. In contrast, few studies have examined CAM use within military populations, which have ready access to conventional medicine. Currently, the prevalence and impact of CAM use in US military populations remains unknown. METHODS To investigate CAM use in...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the effectiveness of an integrated approach to the teaching of evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in a pharmacy curriculum. DESIGN Evidence-based CAM education was integrated throughout the third, fourth, and fifth years of the pharmacy curriculum. Specifically, an introductory module focusing on CAM familiarization was added in the third year a...

This article examines whether self-reported racial discrimination is associated with greater use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and assesses whether the effects of reported racial discrimination are specific to the setting in which the unfair treatment occurred (i.e., medical or nonmedical settings). Data were drawn from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United ...

Purpose It is well known that women of reproductive age are high consumers of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) with emerging research highlighting the use of high amounts of CAM in pregnancy. Substantial data exists about the information sources women use for utilising complementary medicines and treatments generally, however little is known about the sources of information used in ...

The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) continues to grow in the United States. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has devoted a substantial proportion of the Evidence-based Practice Center (EPC) program to systematic reviews of CAM. Such syntheses present different challenges from those conducted on western medicine topics, and in many ways are more difficult. We di...

A complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) system divorced from scientific medicine means that patients can only benefit from the best of both systems by dividing their care. Science must be used to stimulate convergence of complementary and traditional healthcare. First class research to examine the more interesting claims of the alternative health industry is essential to broaden the rang...

Patients and families increasingly press hospitals to facilitate provision of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies and products. At the same time, a growing number of hospitals and health care facilities have taken steps to integrate CAM and conventional care. In this article we consider institutional responsibilities when patients/parents use or are considering CAM. We (1) re...