RAND Corp., Samueli Institute Create Endowment to Study Alternative, Complementary, Integrative Medicine

The RAND Corporation and the Samueli Institute have created an endowment to support independent policy research on complementary, alternative and integrative medicine, organization officials announced today.

The Samueli Institute Fund for Policy Studies in Integrative Medicine at RAND will be established with a $2 million gift from the Samueli Institute and $1 million in funding from RAND. The Samueli Institute is a nonprofit scientific research organization based in Alexandria, Va., and RAND is a nonprofit public policy research organization based in Santa Monica, Calif.

"Many hospitals and other medical providers are looking to integrate complementary and alternative medical practices into their current treatment systems, but they often are unsure which ones have demonstrated value," says James Thomson, president and CEO of RAND. "This gift will make possible the type of high-quality research needed to answer those questions."

"Currently, patients are left on their own when attempting to integrate complementary and alternative practices with their conventional care," says Wayne Jonas, president and CEO of the Samueli Institute. "Proper integration requires good evidence and sound policies. This endowment and chair will provide the nation and patients with objective analysis and effective solutions for guiding the health care system and personal care, toward better integration."

Ian Coulter, a senior health policy analyst at RAND who has been named as the Samueli Institute Chair in Policy for Integrative Medicine at RAND, says alternative and complementary medicine can include approaches such as acupuncture, chiropractic, spirituality, naturopathy, herbal medicine, yoga and meditation. Integrative medicine refers to the combination of alternative approaches with traditional biomedicine.

"Millions of Americans are using some form of complementary or alternative medicine in addition to biomedical treatment, but very little research has been done to establish which treatments are most effective, for what conditions and under which circumstances," Coulter says. "In some cases, a particular kind of complementary or alternative medicine may work best as an adjunct therapy, such as using acupuncture to combat nausea from chemotherapy. In other cases, the alternative therapy may be the best treatment by itself."

Then there's the question of how to integrate complementary, alternative and integrative medicine into a mainstream medical practice, Coulter said. The research fund, which will be managed by RAND Health, will address that question. The fund also will support:

• Descriptive studies that will define complementary and alternative medicine practices and identify what kinds of health problems they can effectively treat.
• The creation of innovative research methods for investigating complementary, alternative and integrative medicine.
• The development of an evaluation process for health care systems' performance, including regulation, quality of care, financing and costs in relation to the integration of complementary and alternative medicine with traditional biomedicine.
  

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Video: Man Pronounced Dead Wakes

Hospital workers fill out the wrong form and send a live man to the morgue.

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Star Trek Device Uses Ultrasound To Seal Punctured Lungs

A stretcher races through the entrance of a busy hospital. The car-accident victim lies on top and grimaces in pain. While surface injuries looks gruesome, the real medical danger is invisible -- internal organ damage caused by being crushed against the steering wheel.

This isn't a scene from Seattle Grace Hospital, the set of the popular television drama Grey's Anatomy, but from its real-life model, Harborview Medical Center. Engineers at the University of Washington are working with Harborview doctors to create new emergency treatments right out of Star Trek: a tricorder type device using high-intensity focused ultrasound rays. This summer, researchers published the first experiment using ultrasound to seal punctured lungs.

"No one has ever looked at treating lungs with ultrasound," says Shahram Vaezy, a UW associate professor of bioengineering. Physicists were skeptical it would work because a lung is essentially a collection of air sacs, and air blocks transmission of ultrasound. But the new experiments show that punctures on the lung's surface, where injuries usually occur, heal with ultrasound therapy.

"The results are really impressive," Vaezy says. He cautions that this is still in the early stages and the technique is not yet being tested on humans.

High-intensity focused ultrasound is now being investigated for a number of different treatments. It promises "bloodless surgery" with no scalpels or sutures in sight. Doctors would pass a sensor over the patient and use invisible rays to heal the wound. Researchers are exploring the use of high-intensity focused ultrasound - with beams tens of thousands of times more powerful than used in imaging - for applications ranging from numbing pain to destroying cancerous tissue.

In this case, lenses focus the high-intensity ultrasound beams at a particular spot inside the body on the patient's lungs. Focusing the ultrasound beams, in a process similar to focusing sunlight with a magnifying glass, creates a tiny but extremely hot spot about the size and shape of a grain of rice. The rays heat the blood cells until they form a seal. Meanwhile the tissue between the device and the spot being treated does not get hot, as it would with a laser beam.

"You can penetrate deep into the body and deliver the energy to the bleeding very accurately," Vaezy says. Recent tests on pigs' lungs showed that high-intensity ultrasound sealed the leaks in one or two minutes. More than 95 percent of the 70 incisions were stable after two minutes of treatment, according to results published this summer in the Journal of Trauma.

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