The Cleveland Clinic, one of the country's top hospitals, has opened an herbal-medicine clinic and is dispensing herbs along with conventional medicines, the
Wall Street Journal reports.
The use of herbal medicine has been practiced in China and other Eastern countries for centuries, but has yet to make inroads in the U.S. because of a lack of scientific evidence proving herbs' effectiveness.
But the hospital's herbal clinic, which is part of the Center for Integrative Medicine, opened in January and has an herbalist who sees patients on Thursdays. Patients must be referred by a doctor and are monitored to ensure that there are no drug-herbal interactions or other complications. The clinic also offers acupuncture, holistic psychotherapy, and massage therapy.
"Western medicine does acute care phenomenally.… But we're still struggling a bit with our chronic-care patients and this fills in that gap and can be used concurrently," says Melissa Young, an integrative medicine physician at Cleveland Clinic, told the Journal.
Only a handful of herbal clinics have opened in the U.S. Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern University and NorthShore University HealthSystem, affiliated with the University of Chicago, both include herbal medicine among their offerings.
Jamie Starkey, an acupuncturist at the Cleveland Clinic who got the herbal clinic started, said there is little scientific research outside Asia on using herbs as medicine. Starkey had to translate studies to convince the Integrative Medicine's former medical director that an herbal clinic could be effective.
At Cleveland Clinic, herbal formulas are bought and ordered through KPC Products, a subsidiary of Taiwan's Kaiser Pharmaceutical Co. Custom-blends are made by Crane Herb Co., based in Massachusetts and California.