The Miami Herald, Inc.; Monday, April 21, 1997
Stephen Smith; Herald Health Writer

That's been especially true for people living with AIDS and the virus that causes it. Since the dawn of the epidemic, AIDS patients have embraced alternative medical therapies -- everything from acupuncture to ozone treatments -- with a determination that has proved pivotal in nudging the unconventional into the mainstream.

Proactive patients

With the advent of potent drug "cocktails," people with AIDS and HIV continue to seek out alternative therapies fervently, providing researchers with important clues about the utility of certain techniques.

"They didn't lie down on the job at all; they didn't say, `Oh, poor us,' when they were diagnosed with HIV," said Carlo Calabrese, a researcher at Bastyr University in Seattle who is studying the use of alternative therapies by AIDS and HIV-positive patients. "This is testimony to the imagination of people faced with crisis."

Last week, Calabrese shared preliminary findings from his work at the second annual Alternative Therapies Symposium, the premier national gathering of practitioners and proponents of medical treatments typically viewed as outside the realm of conventional medicine.

He found that even if patients began taking drugs known as protease inhibitors -- the newest and most powerful class of AIDS drugs, usually taken in combination with other medications -- they also sought relief from a vast array of alternative therapies.

Another pair of researchers demonstrated the popularity of those therapies by surveying 127 HIV-positive patients. Their finding: All 127 had used some form of alternative therapy since being diagnosed with the virus.

And patients who embraced one kind of alternative therapy were "highly likely to use other alternative therapies,", said Carolyn E. Sabo of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and Vicky L. Carwein of the University of Washington at Tacoma.

Assessing impact

But do the therapies work?

That is at the heart of any discussion of alternative therapies, and it's a question addressed by the Bastyr University researchers.

They followed 79 patients during a six-month period to see if acupuncture might play a role in slowing the progression of HIV to full-blown AIDS. They found that HIV-positive patients who got acupuncture treatments were only one-third as likely to develop AIDS in that period as people who didn't get the treatments.

The Bastyr researchers do not cite the numbers as definitive evidence. "We are developing weak evidence," Calabrese said, "in the absence of any at all."

He and the others want their work to be the foundation for more elaborate reviews, so that limited research dollars will be devoted to studying the most promising treatments.

The 500 patients included in the first phase of the Bastyr study reported using 517 different therapies. The other set of researchers found a similarly expansive roster of treatments that included aromatherapy, music therapy and biofeedback.

The researchers from Bastyr were particularly encouraged by this finding: Nearly one-third of the patients surveyed reported that their doctors who practice conventional medicine work in tandem with their practitioners of alternative medicine.

"Once again," Calabrese said, "the AIDS crisis is bringing us to a state of cracking open that consciousness that says, `My God, shouldn't we be doing what's best for the patient, instead of separating into warring camps?' "

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