Suffering from multiple sclerosis, Cynthia Crowner sees her neurologist and physiatrist regularly. But the 57-year-old Annapolis resident also pays regular visits to a spacious examining room on the wooded campus of the University of Maryland's Kernan Hospital near Dickeyville.
There she discusses her degenerative nerve disease with Dr. Brian Berman, a family medicine professor who runs the university's Center for Integrative Medicine.
Satisfied that Berman has heard her out, Crowner leaves with a bottle of homeopathic pills and advice to add seaweed to her diet. "They don't treat you like an idiot," she says of her health care team.
After 15 years at the center he founded, Berman believes health care increasingly will look like Crowner's regimen -- integrating Western practices with those from other traditions, such as yoga, meditation, acupuncture and Chinese herbal treatments.
The center is one of a few in the nation that does all of those things and more, operating a clinic, conducting research into the effectiveness of alternative medicine and spreading word of its findings to the public and the medical profession.
So far, however, Berman and other advocates have had more success with patients than with medical peers. Their work also illustrates the fine ethical line that some practitioners of "integrative" medicine must walk -- dispensing treatments proven in clinical trials along with therapies that they and their patients believe in but which haven't been subjected to rigorous scientific testing.
Robert Stover, for example, is among the millions of Americans who, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, use some form of alternative medicine every day.
At the UM clinic, the 53-year-old Rockdale resident receives acupuncture, along with a form of Chinese massage known as Tui Na and a variety of traditional and homeopathic drugs, some designed to stimulate his immune system to ward off allergies.
His visits were among 3,100 the center recorded in fiscal 2005, and it projects 3,600 visits this fiscal year
Stover hasn't found a cure for his migraines, but he has found satisfaction at the center, which emphasizes identifying and avoiding the factors that trigger his problems, as well as treating them.
"I pretty much zeroed in on it after I came here," Stover says of learning which environmental factors to avoid -- a list that included the kind of paper found in catalogs, phone books and computer printouts.
