Choosing an Alternative Remedy?

April 24, 2000 (Berkeley, Calif.) -- When Leslie Palmer was suffering from painful and debilitating stomach problems, she called a gastroenterologist and was told the earliest available appointment was two months away.

Frustrated by the long wait, Palmer (not her real name) visited an herbalist and got a prescription for herbs, which she diligently brewed into a tea and drank daily.

Two months later, when she finally met with the gastroenterologist, she told him that she felt a lot better since she'd started the herbs.

"The strange thing was, he totally ignored what I told him," she says. "He didn't ask where I got the herbs or who prescribed them. I might as well have said my symptoms were better because I'd been howling at the moon."

Such disinterest is all too common. It's one reason that many patients prefer not to tell their conventional doctors about the alternative medicines they're using. As more and more patients try these therapies, the risk of a clash with conventional medical treatments has researchers worried.

A 1997 study by David Eisenberg, MD, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, found that almost half of all Americans use some form alternative medicine, but of these only a third told their physicians.

And a study published in the February 1 issue of Cancer shows just how little conventional doctors know about what their patients are doing. When researchers polled 50 men undergoing radiation treatment for prostate cancer, they were shocked to find more than a third were using alternative medicines -- the patients' doctors had estimated the number at around 4%.

That's a problem because certain herbs can make patients so sensitive that radiation treatments burn them, says Barrie Cassileth, PhD, chief of integrative medicine at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Other herbs, meanwhile, can diminish radiation's effectiveness.

Almost every week, there is a new warning about the improper use of herbal or dietary supplements alone or in conjunction with prescription drugs. So why do patients remain reluctant to discuss alternative medicine with their conventional doctors?

According to a study of breast cancer patients published the June 1999 issue of the Journal of Family Practice, women did not reveal their use of alternative therapies because they felt their physicians would not be interested in the therapies, were biased against them, or simply didn't know enough to comment.

Another possibility, says Larry Borgsdorf, PharmD, at Kaiser Permanente in Bakersfield, Calif., is that patients don't really think of nutritional or dietary substances as medicine. "Dietary supplements are marketed as natural products. The verbiage is that they're natural, they're safe, they can't hurt you. Because of that, patients don't think of them as having pharmacological activity."

San Francisco General Hospital physician Donald Abrams, MD, recalls one man who came in with a rash covering his body. When Abrams checked the patient's chart, no medications were listed. But when he asked about herbal supplements, the man began ticking off a list that spilled over the 12 lines available as Abrams tried to write them down.