Hummel, for one, says he is not worried about engaging with the medical establishment.

He commended those physicians who investigate non-traditional medicine because they bring such therapies to the attention of the scientific community.

"Dr. Eisenberg made a good point," he says. "You need to know all about it. You can't disapprove of it if you don't like it."

From Alternative to Integrative

Much discussion at the conference centered on the proper way to describe the work that massage therapists, acupuncturists and herbalists do.

The government term for non-traditional therapies is "complementary and alternative medicine," or CAM.

The name comes from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), an institute at the National Institutes of Health established by Congress in 1998.

But some practitioners of CAM find that label inaccurate, demeaning, or both.

"I find some of those terms very insulting," Kaptchuk says. "I'm not a doctor of complementary, or unconventional or alternative medicine."

One term acceptable to most parties is "integrative."

This label change reflects the increased acceptance of studying non-traditional practices.

For example, Rosenthal is involved in an integrative cancer treatment program at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. He stresses that integrative treatments are used in addition to traditional therapies, not instead of them.

"The success of the field will be when the labels disappear from the conversation and we just have good medicine," says Eisenberg.

Science and Not Science

Both physicians and non-traditional practitioners say the next step is to use science to investigate the effectiveness of unproven therapies.

One physician who has embraced non-traditional medicine is Dr. Felecia L. Dawson, an obstetrician/gynecologist from Atlanta. After going into private practice, Dawson says she realized that "what I had been taught in medical school was insufficient to help my patients heal."

She says that she does not hesitate to recommend herbs or massage therapy for her patients.