Identification of Diseases that may be Targets for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)

Complementary and alternative medicine has an enormous challenge to determine how environmental factors such as infection and xenobiotics interact. Effective strategies for early detection, diagnosis, prevention and therapy should then emerge. Despite significant advancements in medicine and discovery of human genome, little attention has been paid to early diagnosis and prevention of complex diseases. Diseases such as Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, cardiovascular, autoimmune, cancer, diabetes and others are multifactorial, meaning that they cannot be ascribed to mutation in a single gene or to a single environmental factor. Rather they arise from the combined action of many genes, environmental factors such as infection, xenobiotics and risk-conferring behaviors (Kimberstis and Roberts, 2002). Com-plex diseases have reached epidemic proportions in the United States and in a particularly disturbing trend, striking at a young age. With this explosion, we should be committed to expanding the approach to healing. This opens classical approaches to complementary and alternative therapies.