Letter from the Executive Director

Winter 2003

The Pine Street Foundation has entered a new era of development. With twenty-four years of clinical expertise in integrative care, solid research experience, and a strong network of collaborators around the world, we are now in a position to develop the Pine Street Foundation into a major research institution.

Our mission is to bridge the divide between Traditional Chinese Medicine and conventional Western Medicine through evidence-based research programs that yield results that can be widely accepted by the entire medical community.

The efficacy of complementary and alternative medicine, including Traditional Chinese Medicine, is becoming more widely accepted by the general public. According to a landmark study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), in the United States, the estimated total number of visits to alternative medical practitioners in 1997 reached an astonishing 629 million, exceeding the total visits to all primary care physicians during the same period. (Eisenberg, 1998)

But despite the high number of people using alternative therapies, there still exists a wide communication gap between the conventional and alternative medical communities; the JAMA study revealed that less than 40% of patients disclosed their use of alternative therapies to their conventional physician. While there are various explanations, the lack of evidence-based research generated from the field of integrative medicine may be an important contributing factor.

Additionally, since most alternative medicines are introduced from abroad, the natural language barrier further hinders communication. A significant amount of integrative medical research, for example, is conducted in China, but since this work is rarely translated from Chinese into English, the vast majority of the Western medical community never has the opportunity to learn about these findings.

Because of our in-house language ability, our substantial clinical experience in integrative care, and our research capability in both Chinese and English, the Pine Street Foundation is in a unique position to bridge these gaps, which has already allowed us to contribute to advancements in the practice and research of integrative medicine for the benefit of patients and the general public. For example, we recently published the meta-analysis titled, "Chinese Herbal Medicine and Interferon in the Treatment of Chronic Hepatitis B," in the American Journal of Public Health. From the 587 Chinese articles and abstracts systematically reviewed, a handful of herbs were identified as having promising effects when combined with the standard therapy, alpha-interferon. (McCulloch, 2002) As a result of this publication, physicians and researchers from 14 countries contacted us for more information and to discuss our findings.

Currently, we are embarking on an ambitious meta-analysis research program that systematically reviews previous clinical trials to evaluate and substantiate the effectiveness of integrated treatment protocols for a wide range of illnesses. A meta-analysis is a method of systematically selecting relevant primary research, appraising its quality, and synthesizing the results to arrive at a summary answer. Initially, our reviews will focus on integrative treatments for some of the most common forms of cancer where conventional treatments have had more limited success, including cancers of the bladder, brain, breast, colon, kidney, liver, pancreas, and stomach. By generating these analyses and publishing our conclusions in international medical journals, we hope to make available to the non-Chinese speaking public the results of the vast body of literature published in Chinese-language journals. Furthermore, we hope that this rigorous scientific scrutiny will help further the acceptance of integrative medicine by the larger medical and scientific community and will encourage further research.

In addition to conducting meta-analyses, the Pine Street Foundation will continue our work on studying the efficacy of integrative treatment for lung cancer by launching a clinical trial in collaboration with Dr. Alan Kramer, thoracic oncologist at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. Dr. Kramer will serve as principal investigator in a rigorously designed double-blinded trial that will investigate the benefits of adding herbal-vitamin combination therapy to standard chemotherapy for patients with non-small cell lung cancer.

We sincerely invite you to join us to help advance the field of integrated medicine for the benefits of those in need of better treatments.

Your support, involvement, and suggestions are always highly appreciated.

Citations:
· Eisenberg, D. M., R. B. Davis, et al. (1998). "Trends in alternative medicine use in the United States, 1990-1997: results of a follow-up national survey." JAMA 280(18): 1569-75.
· McCulloch, M., M. Broffman, et al. (2002). "Chinese herbal medicine and interferon in the treatment of chronic hepatitis B: a meta-analysis of randomized, controlled trials." Am J Public Health 92(10): 1619-28.

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Pine Street Foundation · 124 Pine Street · San Anselmo · California · 94960-2674
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