Complementary and Alternative Medicine for Serious Illness

This website is designed to collect information from patients and health care providers about promising therapies for serious illness. We are asking about your use of different therapies and treatments for serious illnesses. By serious illnesses, we mean conditions that are long-lasting, do not usually improve on their own, and are rarely cured completely (such as diabetes, asthma, depression, HIV/AIDS, Parkinson's disease, or cancer). Information you submit may help us to identify, and make more widely available, effective therapies that have been previously overlooked.

We are especially interested in finding out about people's use of remedies and treatments that are not typically prescribed by medical doctors. Examples of these include: acupuncture, herbal medicines, homeopathy, Chinese medicine, chiropractic, spiritual healing, and others.

The questions on this website will ask you about the different therapies you may have used in the treatment of disease. We would appreciate it if you could tell us of any therapies you have found to be particularly helpful in improving your illness. Our Definitions page contains information on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) therapies and diseases which may help you report your experience.

All the information you provide will be kept strictly confidential. Visit the About page to learn more about the collaborators on this project.