BETHESDA, Md. — The man behind a wooden table in his office at the National Institutes of Health is Dr. Stephen E. Straus, a virologist, and he is the holder of what may be the most extraordinary job on the institutes' sprawling campus here.
For the past 18 months, Dr. Straus, 54, has been director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which Congress has voted to give almost $90 million for studying the usefulness of such popular nontraditional remedies as acupuncture, food supplements, homeopathy and body manipulation. Now, 42 percent of Americans use various forms of alternative medicine, according to a study by Dr. David Eisenberg of Harvard. Finding out just what works and what does not is the task of Dr. Straus and his staff. Dr. Straus's own training is firmly rooted in the world of traditional science. He has degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. As a researcher, he has studied Lyme disease, AIDS/H.I.V., chronic fatigue syndrome and the various forms of herpes infections. He also was the chief of the laboratory of clinical investigation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "When I was studying herpes," he said, "people would take me aside at parties and tell me their herpes stories." Now, he added, "They are plying me stories about their experiences with St. John's wort and shark cartilage." For the rest go to: http://email.nytimes.com/email/email.jsp?eta5 -- The silver-list is a moderated forum for discussion of colloidal silver. To join or quit silver-list or silver-digest send an e-mail message to: [email protected] -or- [email protected] with the word subscribe or unsubscribe in the SUBJECT line. To post, address your message to: [email protected] Silver-list archive: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html List maintainer: Mike Devour <[email protected]>
