Are These a Cure for the Common Medical Treatment? : Health: The new Office of Alternative Medicine aims to uncover how--or even if--acupuncture, herbs and other alternative therapies work.

Sabanita Herrera has been walking the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico for nearly half a century, handpicking medicinal herbs to ease a slew of ailments.

The 59-year-old curandera , or healer, follows a family tradition handed down at least four generations.

Herrera says the yerba santa, osha root and 103 other herbs she gathers can help relieve the symptoms of arthritis, asthma and a host of other ills.

“A lot of people come to me after they go to a doctor,” Herrera said in an interview from her mountain home in Truchas. “A lot of people depend on my work.”

But such non-conventional therapies as Herrera’s herbal medicine--along with acupuncture, homeopathy and others--are often dismissed in the United States as bogus treatments based on faith, not science.

Now the government is taking note. Congress, through the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., has allotted $2 million to the new federal Office of Alternative Medicine to fund studies of therapies outside the mainstream of Western medicine.

Dr. Steven Kanig, internist and president-elect of the Greater Albuquerque Medical Assn., gives a qualified blessing to the new office but asks: “At a time when health costs are at 14% of GNP (gross national product) and rising, can we afford to invest in these articles of faith?”

Proponents of alternative medicine use the same argument to defend the research as a means to validate therapies that generally are cheaper and less invasive than standard medical treatments.

“Unless we start to find a counterpoint to conventional medicine, there’s no check on the system,” said acupuncturist Glenn Wilcox of Albuquerque. “There’s no marketplace competition. We’ve got one system that is a virtual monopoly--one point of view and one system.”

Dr. Joe Jacobs, who heads the new office, comes from both medical worlds. He witnessed herbal healing on his mother’s Kanawake Mohawk Indian reservation near Montreal, Canada, and received his pediatric training at Yale University School of Medicine and Dartmouth Medical School. He also worked for the Indian Health Service on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico.

“In Gallup, we had a lot of patients and families who took advantage of the opportunity to see a traditional healer,” Jacobs said. “We often worked together. I’m convinced that it’s important.

“The (medical) delivery system could benefit a lot by looking at the experiences of Indians with the Indian Health Service, but it doesn’t have to be an either-or phenomenon,” he said. “I shudder at people making claims that they can cure all sorts of illnesses under the guise of their treatment.”

Jacobs, who will begin seeking grant proposals shortly, hopes to examine, among other things, how non-traditional methods could be used in the treatment of cancer and AIDS.

“I think it’s absolutely an excellent idea,” said Dr. Trevor Hawkins, a family practitioner who works primarily with people who are HIV-positive in Santa Fe. “The real downside of alternative approaches is that there’s no data. If you’re going to incorporate alternative medicine into the mainstream, you’re going to have to convince all kinds of doctors.”

Hawkins said he has used Chinese herbs and acupuncture to relieve some of the painful symptoms accompanying AIDS.

“People who do Chinese medicine tend to tolerate their (conventional) medicine better and have fewer side effects from their drugs. It can benefit things like chronic diarrhea and weight loss” common to people with AIDS, Hawkins said.

The new office is generally applauded in New Mexico, which has a tradition of Indian and Latino folk medicine and is a magnet for New Agers who embrace alternative approaches. In fact, the University of New Mexico School of Medicine holds a seminar during which Indian medicine men, curanderas and other healers give lectures.

“This is a tremendous boon to alternative medicine,” said Dr. Karl Robinson, an Albuquerque physician who specializes in homeopathy. “It’s an opportunity for us to put up or shut up. In a free market, I think it’s time for us to be able to show we can deliver the goods.”

But the enthusiasm of some is tempered by wariness of a government and health industry they are often at odds with over non-traditional remedies.

Advocates are concerned that the new office will be used to dismiss the efficacy of the therapies it studies, reducing the chance that alternative healing will gain acceptance by the medical Establishment.

“Are they trying to help you or get enough data to shoot you down?” asked Albuquerque massage therapist Charles Brown, whose patients include infants and horses.

Many on both sides wonder whether Western testing methods will work on studies of such disciplines as acupuncture and homeopathy, a 19th-Century practice using 2,000 substances, including arsenic and spider venom, that practitioners use in minute doses.

“A lot of these so-called alternative approaches may not respond in the same way to the strict scientific analysis we use on everything else,” said Ben Daitz, associate professor of family and community medicine at the University of New Mexico.

But all agree the office’s yearly appropriation of $2 million--out of the $10.3-billion NIH budget--is not nearly enough to give alternative medicine a fair shake.

Jacobs said he believes critics “ought to relax a little bit.”

“You’ve got to start somewhere,” he said. “I think this is a reasonable approach.”