By Pam McGaffin

This story appeared in your health (formerly WAHealth)

Surgery to remove the cancer in Anna Herrman's breast and lymph nodes had left her in such pain she could barely raise her right arm.

A nurse suggested acupuncture, and two hours after her first treatment, she was nearly pain free and could lift her arm as high as the other one.

"If somebody else were telling me this story, I'm not so sure I would believe them," says Herrman, who commutes three hours one way from her home near Connell, Wash., to appointments at Seattle Cancer Treatment and Wellness Center.

Now, when she goes in for three-month checkups with her oncologist, Dr. Ben Chue, she also sees acupuncturist and Chinese herbalist Darin Bunch at the same clinic for "a tune-up."

Herrman and other patients like her are driving a trend toward the greater integration of Western and Eastern medicine. In the United States, some 36 percent of adults in a recent national health survey were using some form of complementary medicine.

Washington state, perhaps because of its position on the Pacific Rim, has been at the forefront of the movement. The state recognizes and licenses both naturopaths and acupuncturists and requires that insurance companies provide at least some coverage for those treatments.

Not surprisingly, an increasing number of medical providers and facilities are offering referrals to complementary-care practitioners.

At Seattle Cancer Treatment and Wellness Center, an affiliate of Cancer Treatment Centers of America, patients need only walk down the hall. When the cancer clinic opened in 1996, it became the first in the Pacific Northwest to have medical oncologists working side by side with naturopaths, Chinese herbalists and acupuncturists, and a mind-body social worker.

"Now others are jumping on the bandwagon because patients are demanding it, but it's hard to do," says Jerry Kaufman, practice administrator. "We've been perfecting this for years, learning from our patients."

Having a variety of treatment options under one roof is not only more convenient, Kaufman says, it's also safer and more effective because providers and patients are always communicating.

In fact, the center's patients, in consultation with professionals, direct their own care. One of the underlying assumptions is that no single discipline "" or person -- has all the answers, he says.

BBunch, a Master of Traditional Chinese Medicine, is a passionate advocate for his profession, but he readily admits that chemotherapy is the way to tackle tumors. Acupuncture and herbs, on the other hand, help circulation and immunity and have been shown to ease chemo's side effects, including vomiting and pain.

Oncology is "like the dragon, it has to go in and fire away at everything," Bunch says. "Acupuncture puts out the fire" of the side effects, while helping chemotherapy drugs circulate through the system. So it actually improves the outcome of the chemo as well, Bunch says.

He has only to look at his schedule to know the demand for his services. Within his first year and a half at the cancer center, he went from working two days a week to five, and now sees an average of eight to 12 patients a day.

"The integration of medicine is up and coming," he says. "It's going to bring in more practitioners, which is going to bring better care."
Anna Herrman, 74, believes the complementary care she has received, including naturopathy, helped her withstand cycles of chemotherapy and radiation. She only had to skip one chemo treatment because she wasn't feeling well enough.

"I can't say how much of this is due to any one thing," she says. "I just know that my energy level is good, and whatever I'm doing is working."