The following Healthcast report by Channel 4 Action News medical editor Marilyn Brooks first aired Feb. 5, 2004, on Action News at 5 p.m.

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Millions of people are spending billions of dollars a year on alternative medicines, many of which have never been tested or proven to work.

Dr. Stephen Straus, director, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health: "Should it be studied at all, and how it should be studied? In the context of thinking about how to do research, the question is, 'What constitutes ethical research in complementary medicine?'"

Straus and his colleagues have just written a special report addressing those very questions.

Straus: "It's our responsibility to be creative as we are in conventional medicine to constantly use the very most stringent scientific tools that can be brought to bear on any single question."

The money is there. Congress appropriated $117 million for alternative medicine research this year.

The question is how to put unconventional procedures through conventional testing.

Straus: "I would doubt that two chiropractors do their spinal manipulation exactly the same. Of course, that is true in psychotherapy and surgical techniques."

Finding study volunteers may also be an issue.

Straus: "There are invidividuals who will not want to participate in a study with herbal medicine. They will want to get cancer chemotherapy."

Many alternative therapies claim to work, but there is no proof. Straus wants to put these practices through the best testing available, so the public can reap the benefits of those that pass.

Straus says that if clinical medicine ignores complementary and alternative practices, they risk denying patients potentially good therapies in the future.