Consulting with CAM Investigators: Challenges, Opportunities, or Both?

• Activity Number: 336
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 11, 2004 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Teaching Statistics in the Health Sciences
• Author(s): Cynthia R. Long*+ and Christina M. Gullion*+ and Kim McFann*+
• Companies: Palmer Center for Chiropractic Research and Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research and National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Keywords: biostatistics ; complementary and alternative medicine ; consulting ; challenges

Abstract

This panel of PhD biostatisticians will discuss the challenges and opportunities in supporting research efforts in the area of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) drawing from their collective experiences in working with CAM investigators. The panel includes (1) a faculty member of a research university biostatistics department who has a long history of consulting with CAM scientists, (2) an investigator in a federally-funded CAM center within a research center of an HMO-environment, (3) a faculty member in a research center of a CAM institution, and (4) a biostatistician at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at NIH. A major challenge of working with CAM investigators is that while they are typically credentialed providers in the therapy, they often have little or no training in research methods. An interesting aspect of CAM therapies is that many involve a multimodal, individualized, holistic approach to health care which is difficult to study in the standard randomized clinical trial. Therefore, challenges include the limited basic science and early phase clinical research available and issues related to blinding, placebo controls, the need for measurement development and analyzing data when there are many outcomes of interest in relatively small sample sizes.