By Nancy Snyderman, M.D.
ABCNEWS.com

S A N   F R A N C I S C O, May 25— Many practitioners still remember how suspicious doctors were of Eastern medicine in the 1980s. 

     “You really didn’t tell people what you did because in most states, it was illegal and in most places, you were thought of as a felon,” “recalls licensed acupuncturist Robbee Fian.
     But with a recent Harvard study showing that 60 percent of chronic pain sufferers use some form of alternative medicine, traditional doctors could no longer ignore patient requests for options.
     Now Western physicians are increasingly turning to Eastern medicine for help with pain control. Doctors are prescribing everything from acupuncture to movement-based qi gong (pronounced chee gong) for people who need help with pain, but either aren’t responding to conventional medicine or don’t like the side effects.
     At UCLA’s Mattel Children’s Hospital, Michael Waterhouse has become the first non-physician acupuncturist to be granted full clinical privileges. 
     “The traditionalists, in a sense, got into complementary medicine kicking and screaming because it wasn’t by their choice,” says Dr. Lonnie Zelzer, director of the Pediatric Pain Program at UCLA. “The whole movement, I think, was moved by the public.”

Studying Alternative Therapies
By now, traditionalists are moving it even further. UCLA and other medical schools and universities are doing research to better understand how acupuncture and other alternative therapies work. At the University of Maryland’s Complementary Medicine Program, two recent studies evaluated the effectiveness of acupuncture for the treatment of osteoarthritis pain and qi gong for the painful muscular/skeletal disease fibromyalgia. Both treatments gave significant relief. 
     At the University of California, Dr. Zang-Hee Cho has shown that an acupuncture point on the foot actually stimulates the area of the brain that controls sight. That and other findings may very well alter how medicine is practiced in the United States. 
     “I think we will drop the label ‘alternative’ and ‘conventional’ and it will become ‘effective’ and non-effective,’” says Dr. Brian Berman, director of the Complimentary Medicine Program of the University of Maryland. 
     That’s the only distinction important to any chronic pain sufferer.