Medicine on the Mend
Four patients at the Center for Optimum Health in Fountain Valley relax in lounge chairs as a gaudy yellow liquid drips into their veins from IV bags.
In a room filled with sunlight and sounds of nature on CD, their bodies soak up individually prepared cocktails of vitamins, minerals, amino acids and herbal concentrates designed to improve their health.
This is no renegade clinic headed by a college dropout, or outpost spa peddling mudpacks and vegetable smoothies. Rather, it is part of the Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center, a 230-bed acute-care hospital, and is run by a board certified physician.
Welcome to the blossoming field of “complementary medicine” where mainstream practice melds with alternative therapies and physicians take part in the growing market for nontraditional medicine.
The goal, according to center director Dr. Allen Green, is to blend the best of both worlds, ensuring that “patients using alternative treatments do it with the advice of a physician.” Rather than replacing traditional Western medicine with alternative therapies, “here the idea is to combine them,” he said.
This trend linking the two traditions is new and largely driven by the demands of patients.
“I think most physicians have come to realize that their patients are doing this,” said Dr. John Link, a cancer specialist who heads the comprehensive breast-care center at both Long Beach Memorial Medical Center and Orange Coast, where he works with Green.
To have this at a hospital “would have been absolutely unheard of five years ago,” said Link. “It would have been heresy.”
Treatments Include Acupuncture, Massage
Alternative practitioners welcome the chance to integrate the two worlds.
“As people start to look for more answers, they are looking more to alternative therapies, and as their doctors become more supportive, patients are encouraged,” said licensed acupuncturist Jeanne Tumanjan, who practices at the Center for Optimum Health.
The clinic, with its burbling fountains and Oriental-style gardens, opened earlier this year. It offers a wide range of nontraditional treatments to outpatients as well as those at the hospital. These range from common therapies that even more conservative physicians accept to more exotic practices; the offerings include aromatherapy, acupuncture, intravenous drips, Jim Shin acutouch energy balancing, Chinese medicine, deep tissue sculpting massage and other holistic therapies.
Hospital chief operating officer Marcia Manker said a growing patient interest in a more holistic approach to health--as well as demand for non-Western therapies, especially among the growing Asian population in Southern California--prompted the hospital to pursue the partnership.
“Part of it is to create a niche for my hospital,” she said, “and attract people to the [hospital] campus.”
Alternative medicine is growing rapidly nationwide. Americans spent $21.2 billion in 1997 on such treatments with visits to alternative practitioners jumping 47% between 1990 and 1997, according to Dr. David M. Eisenberg of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
A Times Poll last year showed that 35% of Californians had tried high-dose vitamin therapy at some point in their lives, 32% had sought chiropractic care, 11% had tried homeopathy and 8% had used acupuncture.
While Orange Coast is the only hospital with a program like this so far in Orange County, others are talking about it, including those in the statewide St. Joseph Health System.
“It is responding to consumer demand,” said John Gilwee, vice president of the Healthcare Assn. of Southern California, a hospital trade group.
The medical profession’s reaction is mixed. Alternative therapies remain controversial. There is widespread skepticism about their effectiveness, though grudging acceptance of the consumer trend.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, for instance, began an Integrative Medicine Program late last year after a two-year internal debate over the legitimacy of offering acupuncture, chiropractic, mind-body techniques and herbal therapies. The program includes doing outcome studies to determine the effectiveness of the therapies, said Dr. Glenn Braunstein, who heads the department of medicine.
“If you look at the data, 50% of our patients use alternative therapies and 70% don’t tell their physicians about them,” he said. “Our staff needs to be educated about this . . . and “we want to know what works.”
UCI College of Medicine offers an Asian medicine elective to its students, while its researchers are investigating the efficacy of various forms of alternative medicine. This week the college received a $93,300 grant to survey 400 patients to determine who uses alternative health care and why. The survey is being done in conjunction with the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic in Whittier and Glendale and the Keimyng-Baylo School of Oriental Medicine in Anaheim.
And in a growing sign of acceptance, said Green, insurance companies and even some HMOs are more commonly paying for chiropractic, acupuncture, IV therapy and even some of the massage done by his team of 10 practitioners.
Green, who is an assistant professor at UCI and has been in family practice for 11 years, said the reception at Orange Coast has been “tremendous. My fears have been allayed.”
‘She Thinks I Am a Quack’
That hasn’t always been the case. He remembers a rude reception he received while giving a lecture at a Newport Beach hospital two years ago, and last year a senior resident at Long Beach Memorial kept looking skyward during one of his classes.
“Her eyes couldn’t have rolled any further back in her head,” he said. “She thinks I am a quack.”
To integrate complementary medicine with the hospital’s treatment schemes, Green is giving staff lectures, community seminars and is also drafting professional training and competence standards for nontraditional practitioners, who will be eligible to join the hospital staff.
Link, who runs the breast center, sees great potential for integrating a holistic approach with the kind of comprehensive care offered women by his team of oncologists, radiologists, surgeons, internists, pathologists and plastic surgeons.
“We know from surveying our [breast cancer] patients that over half of the women go out on their own and find complementary therapies to enhance their health and alleviate side effects,” he said. “They used to hide it from their doctors.”
Link, Green and Tumanjan see benefits to cancer patients from nutrition counseling, massage, IV therapy and acupuncture. “We are just opening up to it and we are going to learn in this process,” said Link.
Nevertheless, he retains some professional skepticism, wondering if some of the positive results could be due to a placebo effect. As part of the program, he said, “we would also like to do some sort of benchmark testing and see if people are wasting their money or not.”
At the Center for Optimum Health on a recent weekday, several patients said they have no doubts about the benefits.
Judy Anderson, 50, of Villa Park, goes to the center weekly for a designer mix of vitamins, minerals and amino acids. She started IV therapy after more conventional treatment failed to deal with extreme fatigue and chronic pain.
“I was desperate and Dr. Green turned me around,” she said. “There were days when the pain kept me in bed. . . . I don’t have the energy I once had, but I can travel.”
Green doesn’t worry whether the therapies are mainstream or have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“Because it hasn’t passed a double-blind study doesn’t mean it doesn’t work,” he said. “When a patient says she is a lot better, that’s what counts.”
