Alternative medications and other treatments for tinnitus: facts from fiction

Since the dawn of human existence, nutritional supplements, herbs, and phytonutrients have been used to heal. Forty percent of Americans have used some form of complementary-integrative medicine (CIM) to treat a wide variety of chronic conditions. In 1998, expenditures on CIM in the United States approached $27 billion and increased to $32 billion in 2000 [1]. This paradigm shift to alternative forms of therapy is gaining acceptance for many reasons including patients ’ dissatisfaction with conventional medi-cal care, which is perceived to be too intent on curing rather than prevent-ing disease, and the fact that prescription medicines have many side effects and hence, patients are often con-compliant. Conversely, the conventional western physician is typically skeptical of CIMpractices because of the lack of double-blind randomizedplacebo-controlled studies. This is a particularly dif-ficult problem because the pharmaceutical industry is not routinely interested in funding studies to assess the efficacy of herbs and other supplements because patent protection is unlikely. Coupled with the fact that the cost to bring a compound through the US Food and Drug Administration averages $300 million or more, it is no wonder that studies into this arena are rare [2]. Conventional medical fields, such as allopathic and osteopathic medicine, were only introduced in the United States less than 200 years ago. This subsequently led to the rapid reduction in CIM therapies because these were suddenly viewed as antiquated and a form of quackery. The unfortunate result of this skepticism was the overemphasis solely on conventional medi-cine as a means to heal and cure. In the best scenario, tapping into knowl-edge from both CIM and conventional medicine would likely lead to better overall care of patients