LAUSR

When we launched our journal COMPLEMENTARY MEDICINE RESEARCH a quarter of a century ago as FORSCHENDE KOMPLEMENTÄRMEDIZIN, our field was small. We were a couple of research activists meeting in the late Steven Karger’s office in Basel. My vote for an English title, already then, was overruled with the argument that most research was happening in the German-speaking countries anyway, a point which was difficult to counter at the time, in 1992. At the same time, and without any one of us knowing this, senator Tom Harkin and congressman Berkley Bedell started political moves to open the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) in the USA, which became the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) in 1995 [1]. Starting with just a few million USD, its budget became comparatively large amounting to 120–150 million USD over the years. As is often the case, once the colleagues in the USA understand that something is important and open the political arena for it, they do it more consequently than us in Europe. Academic centers opened their doors for research, patient care, and training of students and doctors. What is called Integrative Medicine (IM) nowadays – the integration of wellresearched and proven methods into conventional care –, is available in almost all reputable American medical schools, and 72 institutional members make up the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health (www.imconsortium.org/about/factsheet.cfm). The next conference of the Consortium in conjunction with the International Society for Complementary Medicine Research (ISCMR; www.iscmr.org) in Baltimore, MD, in May 2018 (https://internationalcongress.imconsortium.org) will bring together at least 1,000 researchers from all over the globe. Had anyone told us this at our first brainstorming meeting in Steven Karger’s office, we would have laughed heartily. Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) or IM has become a serious player, both in the scientific field and on the market. One of the major accomplishments of joint research efforts was the grudging acceptance of acupuncture into health care systems across the Western world [2, 3]. The US military uses it for acute-pain control, the US academic centers offer it in their portfolio, even the German statutory reimbursement system pays for it. Another highlight is the mutation of placebo research into a mainstream effort of considerable impact. This was fueled by a conference organized at the OAM in 1995 and a call for proposals by the NCCAM following this meeting. The insight of how important so-called non-specific therapeutic effects can be, and that they should rather be called selfhealing responses [4–6], is genuinely derived from CAM research. Attempting to understand how acupuncture and manual therapy works has prompted various researchers to study the connective tissue and the extracellular matrix [7–9], an area that has always been in the focus of holistic researchers, especially in Germany [10, 11]. Published online: February 26, 2018