Alternative medicine: Massage therapy, acupuncture, and herbal supplements are just some of the very popular complementary and alternative treatments that 100 million Americans are using every year and spending €30 billion dollars doing it - Europe is taking the alternative option in similarly high numbers.
A report issued this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association highlights the need to study these treatments and questions how to make sure the research is ethical.
Dr Stephen Straus and a team from the Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, says "complementary and alternative medicine has a lot of controversy surrounding it, including whether it should be studied at all, how it should be studied, and what constitutes ethical research in complementary medicine".
The US Congress has appropriated €117 million dollars towards alternative medicine research this year. But the question is how to put a sometimes-unconventional procedure through conventional testing. Finding willing participants for studies may also be an issue.
Many alternative therapies claim to work but have never been tested or proven. Dr Straus wants to uphold these practices to the best testing available so the public can then reap the benefits of those products and procedures that pass.
He believes if we ignore the complementary and alternative practices, then we do so at the risk of denying ourselves good therapy and even better therapies in the future.