WEIGHING IN ON ALTERNATIVE HEALTH

The demand for alternative forms of health care has helped many Southwest Florida practices grow steadily, even while economic doldrums battered other industries. Better scientific data, celebrity endorsements and the economy have all led customers to products and services ranging from naturopathic chiropractors to yoga, and from herbal blends and botanicals to iridology.

“There’s no doubt that the trend toward natural medicine is increasing worldwide,” said Dr. Robert Morse, who has been a naturopathic practitioner, lecturer and author in Port Charlotte and elsewhere for more than three decades.

According to a federal study, about 83 million adults in the United States use some form of complementary or alternative health care.

The Alive & Well Holistic Center in Fort Myers opened its doors in July 2008, providing a wide range of products and services, including those listed above. Owner Kelli Ackroyd had 135 clients in December 2008 and 280 clients at the end of 2009. For those depressed because of the recession, the emotional and spiritual aspect of holistic practices has an added appeal.

ACKROYD “It’s about taking the whole person into account: physical body, emotions, mind and spirit,” Ms. Ackroyd said. “All those things come into play when you’re helping heal someone. A lot of times people have emotions or a thought process that is keeping them from getting healthy.”

Dr. Paul Finucan, a naturopathic chiropractor and owner of the Alternative Health & Healing Center in North Naples, opened a new office in Fort Myers this month.

“For many of my patients, I’m their primary (health care) provider,” he said.

“My patients come to me if they have a cold, a rash, if they have diabetes. A lot of people seek alternative medicine when it comes to cancer, because chemo and radiation and surgeries aren’t showing any more success.”

Kelli Ackroyd, owner of the Alive & Well Holistic Center in Fort Myers, has more than doubled her client base in the past year. EVAN WILLIAMS/ FLORIDA WEEKLY But alternative health practitioners also face an array of challenges, from skepticism from the mainstream medical community, to an insurance industry that covers few of their procedures and herbal remedies. Dr. Morse, who has a doctor of science degree in biochemistry and a doctorate of naturopathy from the Brantridge Forest School in Sussex, England, is in favor of using his methods of nutrition and herbal supplements to replace almost all mainstream medical practices and drugs, aside from surgery. And he claims to “cure” an impressive range of conditions, including depression, cancer, AIDS, diabetes and high blood pressure.

FINUCAN “The medical community needs to withdraw from practice and become surgeons,” he said. “That’s radical, but only to mainstream thinkers.”

Most practitioners lean more toward complementing mainstream medicine, rather than replacing it. That includes Dr. Finucan and Ms. Ackroyd.

But the industry still doesn’t have the full support of mainstream doctors. The American Medical Association says complementary and alternative medicine needs “further investigation” to be recommended. The medical societies in Lee, Collier and Charlotte counties don’t accept doctors as members, unless they are an M.D. or D.O.

A growing industry

Skepticism from the mainstream medical community hasn’t stopped many consumers. Federal reports say alternative medicine is a $33.9 billion per year industry in the United States. And the government has responded by steadily increasing research funding for such health care practices, up to $129 million this year from $2 million in 1992.

MORSE But that’s a pittance compared to the dollars poured into rigorous scientific testing for companies that manufacture mainstream drugs and the procedures used by doctors who practice mainstream medicine.

That includes Dr. Craig Sweet, president of the Lee County Medical Society and a reproductive endocrinologist. He believes alternative forms of health care have the potential to stand on a level playing field, or be integrated seamlessly, with medical practices like his. But not until most of them are validated with randomized, blinded tests, the usual method of establishing that a pill or procedure is valid. Even if there are scores of personal anecdotes about how a certain herb works, he wants further scientific proof before he prescribes it.

“Most physicians feel uncomfortable when a claim is made that (methods or medicines not tested by randomized, blinded studies) can treat infective disease,” he said. “I’m not telling you that it can’t, but I’d ask for true data showing that it could before I’d be willing to accept it to be used for patient care.

“I think I would like to see the same scrutiny applied to these alternative medical categories, the same level of scrutiny that I put forth in my own field. I want data, and I want good data, before I begin to prescribe it for my patients.”

Many practitioners of therapies like acupuncture or Chinese herbs counter that their methods have been used for thousands of years in Eastern medicine. And an argument in favor of scientific rigor does little to dissuade patients who feel they’ve experienced success using approaches outside mainstream medicine.

Doug English is a Port Charlotte retiree who took one of Dr. Morse’s classes on using natural means to be healthy.

“I think time with (Dr. Morse) is time well spent,” Mr. English said. “He’s a specialist, and in my opinion a genius, and I’d certainly have him as part of my healing process.”

Alternative practitioners say their most powerful marketing tool has been their own clients.

“If everybody out there in the population knew what I could do to help somebody, I’d have to fight people off to get to my door every day,” said Dr. Finucan, who has a doctorate in chiropractic from The National University of Health Sciences in Chicago (formerly the National College of Chiropractic). “I treat most of the professional golfers and tennis pros in the Naples area. You help them when nothing else helped them, all of a sudden the buzzword is ‘go see this chiropractor.’ All of a sudden you become more accepted because all of a sudden you’re treating professional athletes in the area.”

Dr. John P. Guercio Jr. has been a pulmonary (lung) specialist in Naples for 27 years and is one of Dr. Finucan’s clients.

“I believe in the future, you and I will live to see when complementary and alternative medicine is on par with allopathic medicine,” he said. “I think there will be a progressive education of the American people, where they will look upon their colleges in complementary and alternative medicine as peers and equals, and there will be a nice, happy exchange of patients, rather than looking at it as something to be avoided.”

Alternative insurance

Insurance covers almost none of the herbs and an extremely limited number of the procedures that are considered a complement or an alternative to mainstream medicine in the United States. But with more patients seeking it, they might be catching up.

“More and more insurances are covering alternative medicine,” Dr. Finucan said. “Most cover chiropractic. Some are picking up acupuncture and other things.”

For the first time in his nearly three decades of work — his father was also a chiropractor — he plans to participate in Medicare. That’s because he found a company that charges him a reasonable amount to process Medicare payments, about $5 to $7 per claim. Before, he said, it would have taken a “full-time staff” to manage the payments.

Many alternative care providers can’t justify the expense and hassles of dealing with insurance companies. Dr. Morse doesn’t participate directly with insurance companies, but he reports saving some clients thousands of dollars — as well as painful side effects — on procedures he views as harmful and unnecessary, such as chemotherapy.

Alive & Well’s Ms. Ackroyd is busy with clients even if insurance companies don’t cover the expenses. One insurance company wanted to list her as a provider, but only if she dropped her energy healing sessions, which she wasn’t willing to do. Many alternative care practitioners simply provide a receipt for their patients if they want to seek repayment from an insurance company.

“It’s not an issue for our clients,” she said.

Testing… testing

There is a growing field of data about the remedies used at the Alive & Well Holistic Center or by Dr. Morse and Dr. Finucan.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a branch of the National Institute of Health, supports controlled, randomized tests for many alternative treatments. A few recent ones,

reported on in a 2008 New York Times

article, described the benefits of yoga, and another looked at how the extract from a ginkgo biloba tree could delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

But many of these tests were performed on a relatively small scale, intended as stepping stones to more definitive tests. And other mainstream medical organizations pay little attention to complementary or alternative health care, even though it’s a growing industry.

“These statistics show that complementary and alternative medical practices are a frequently used component of Americans’ health care regimens, and reinforce the need for rigorous research to study the safety and effectiveness of these therapies,” said Dr. Josephine P. Briggs, director of NCCAM, in a press release.

Almost half of the alternative health industry ($15.4 billion per year) represents what people spend on “vitamin supplements,” such as herbal preparations. But they aren’t regulated, making it harder to distinguish between ones that are effective, not all that helpful, or even harmful.

“One does not always know what you’re getting in that container,” Lee Medical Society president Dr. Sweet says.

One problem, he says, is that the herbs and botanicals used in many alternative approaches are too simple to generate the millions of dollars needed to be properly tested. No one would make any money from it.

“To get a large study, to do a randomized control study, is hard,” he said. “And then to show either it works or doesn’t work and everybody benefits — it’s a great thing for the general public, but it’s a very difficult thing for a manufacturing company, or someone who does the study. Let’s say ginseng was to be used to treat the common cold. If one did a randomized control study and it seemed to show it could actually work, how do you tap into that (from a business standpoint)? You can’t. You couldn’t patent it, protect it.

“There’s a reality there. Now, would we all like to know if ginseng will work? Of course we would. (But) It’s just not practical when you can grow this in your backyard. An organization would not survive if it spent millions of dollars to bring an herb to the market that anyone could create. There’s a practical issue and that’s the problem.” ¦