TabsMagic

Medical students have given a 75% approval to integrating more complementary and alternative medicine into conventional medicine. The survey was the largest undertaking of its kind with medical students across the country being surveyed by researchers from UCLA and UC San Diego. The result showed that most medical students felt that “conventional Western medicine would benefit by integrating more CAM therapies and ideas.”

Ryan Abbott, the study author and a researcher at the UCLA Centre for East-West Medicine said, “Complementary and alternative medicine is receiving increased attention in light of the global health crisis and the significant role of traditional medicine in meeting public health needs in developing countries.” He further went on to say that “Integrating CAM into mainstream health care is now a global phenomenon, with policy makers at the highest levels endorsing the importance of a historically marginalized form of health care.”
 
The survey team comprised experts from several fields, namely Western medicine, CAM, integrative medicine, medical education and survey development. Between them, they created a unique 30 question survey that they sent to 126 medical schools all across the United States. 3% of the medical students completed the survey making it 1,770 completed surveys.
 
74% of the responses “agreed to some extent that a system of medicine that integrates therapies of conventional and complementary and alternative medicine would be more effective than either type of medicine provided independently.”
 
Professor Michael S. Goldstein, a senior research scientist at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and also the professor of Public Health and Sociology was another study author. He said  “Even with the high prevalence of CAM use today, most physicians still know little about non-conventional forms of medicine,” adding that by “Investigating medical students’ attitudes and knowledge will help us assess whether this may change in the future.”
 
The National Institutes of Health, the Annenberg Foundation and the Gerald Oppenheimer Family Foundation provided funding for the project. The survey is to be published on the Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine website.

UK researchers have conducted experiments that resulted in the discovery that mint tea can relieve pain. Brazilian mint tea otherwise known as hyptis crenata appears to have equal analgesic qualities as proprietary pain killers.
 
A team of researchers from Newcastle went to Brazil to discover how the Brazilian tea medicine is traditionally prepared so they could recreate the same thing at home. They found that the most common method of preparation was to boil the dry leaves for 30 minutes and allow the concoction to cool before use.
 
Graciela Rocha, the lead researcher of the project said: “Since humans first walked the Earth we have looked to plants to provide a cure for our ailments – in fact it is estimated more than 50,000 plants are used worldwide for medicinal purposes. Besides traditional use, more than half of all prescription drugs are based on a molecule that occurs naturally in a plant.”

So, there! Here is me wondering how hard the pharmaceutical companies are going to be working to sit on that one!!

They certainly are not too forthcoming about shouting the benefits of sports massage for long term pain relief!