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Constance M. Park, MD, PhD, Guest Editor

The author is with the Department of Medicine and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY.

Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Constance M. Park, MD, PhD, Rosenthal Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Box 75, 630 W 168th St, New York, NY 10032 (e-mail: cmp4{at}columbia.edu).

Patients will always have access to a variety of possibly effective, but unproved, therapies directed at maintaining health or treating illness. And there will always be complex, potentially therapeutic regimens that cannot be adequately tested for financial, ethical, or methodological reasons. Furthermore, even after adequate study of a given regimen, there will always be the fundamental uncertainty of medical practice: the fact that epidemiological research produces probabilistic results that cannot predict with certainty the best treatment for the single unique patient before us.

The exploration of complementary and alternative medicine topics in the medical school curriculum helps to elucidate the complex and uncertain nature of medical practice, sharpens skills for clinical decisionmaking, increases cultural sensitivity, and provides ideas for future research.

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