Alternative therapies ranging from Chinese herbs to high-dose vitamins and dietary supplements should be more rigorously tested to ensure that they're safe and actually work, a national panel of experts said yesterday.
With more than a third of Americans reporting that they try alternative treatments, a panel convened by the Institute of Medicine said the remedies should be held to the same standards as conventional therapies. The group, however, did not report that many people are being harmed by the products.
"Complementary and alternative medicine is widespread and here to stay," Dr. Stuart Bondurant, executive dean of Georgetown University Medical Center and the panel's chairman, said in a media briefing. "The same rules should apply ... regardless of [a treatment's] origin and whether it is conventional or alternative medicine."
The panel called for changes to a 1994 law that classified dietary supplements as foods, thereby exempting marketers from proving their products are safe and effective, as pharmaceutical companies must do.
Left unsaid was how the law should be changed. The panel, for example, did not specifically recommend that dietary supplements be classified as drugs, which would require manufacturers to spend tens of millions of dollars on studies. Instead, the group called upon Congress and federal agencies to find a solution after consulting with consumers, research scientists and manufacturers.
The Washington-based Institute of Medicine is an independent organization chartered by Congress to advise the nation on important health issues. For this study, the institute picked a 17-member panel that included a massage therapist, an anthropologist and several doctors who head medical school programs that integrate conventional and alternative medicine.
The panel also called for stricter manufacturing standards for dietary supplements, saying that consumers have no way of knowing whether they contain the ingredients on the label and in the specified amounts.
"Product reliability is low," the committee said in its 330-page report.
Dr. Brian Berman, a panel member who heads the integrative medicine department at the University of Maryland Medical Center, said poor quality control has also hampered research into alternative medicine.
"It's difficult unless we know that the product is consistent from batch to batch," said Berman. "And it's very difficult for health care providers to give informed guidance when often we don't have safety and efficacy data."
