The Portland area's reputation as a hotbed for alternative medicine has attracted the attention of the nation's pre-eminent medical institute. Now representatives of the National Institutes of Health will hold a town hall meeting later this month in Portland to find out more about how people use what it calls complementary and alternative treatments.

The NIH is devoting more time and money to researching treatment that doesn't follow the strict Western gospel, and this region is a key player. Three years ago, it established two of the dozen alternative medicine research centers in the United States at Oregon Health & Science University and Kaiser Permanente's Center for Health Research.

Both received $8 million grants to research the use of everything from herbs to acupuncture, massage to meditation, to ease some of the most perplexing diseases.

Portland stands apart also because it has four nationally recognized alternative medicine colleges, including the National College of Naturopathic Medicine, the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, the Oregon School of Massage and Western States Chiropractic College, OHSU officials said.

Together they are using the NIH money to focus on diseases for which Western treatments aren't particularly effective, such as the troubling jaw malady called temperomandibular disease, Kaiser officials add.

Dr. Barry Oken, neurologist and director of OHSU's alternative medicine research center, developed an interest in ginkgo five years ago as a method for stalling or preventing Alzheimer's disease.

"I think there is an incredible amount of stuff out there and a huge amount of it isn't useful," Oken said. Still, "I think there will be significant treatment found for widespread diseases, from cancer to Alzheimer's."

Even finding that something doesn't work is useful, if for no other reason than the amount of money people pay for alternative medicine. In 1997, for example, estimated 40 percent of Americans used complementary and alternative treatments.

And they spent $21.2 billion in the process, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The interest in alternatives has spread to Clark County.

Dr. Robert Ellis, who runs Southwest Washington Medical Center's cancer center, says he has long considered antioxidants, herbs, and other "alternative" treatments as viable. By summer, Ellis aims to bring naturopaths and similar types of practitioners to the hospital, he said.

　　From Healthy.net