Incoming director(CAN) seeks to get centre for alternative medicine back on track

Article source:
Nature 451, 1026 (20 February 2008) | doi:10.1038/nj7181-1026a

Josephine Briggs, director, US National Center for Complementary and
Alternative Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland

Incoming director seeks to get centre for alternative medicine back on
track.

Since its creation in 1998, the US National Center for Complementary
and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has fallen on tough times. It has
struggled for ever-tightening funding from the National Institutes of
Health (NIH), been criticized for a lack of scientific rigour, and
suffered the untimely death of its first director, Stephen Straus.
Staff hope that a new director will help revive its fortunes. See CV

"Josephine Briggs will gain the staff's confidence and return
stability as well as the excitement and enthusiasm needed for the
centre to grow," says Ruth Kirschstein, former deputy director of the
NIH and acting director of the NCCAM.

Briggs may seem an odd choice to lead the NCCAM, which oversees the
development of alternative treatments. She has worked in traditional
medicine since receiving her medical degree from Harvard in 1970. In
fact, she specialized in renal physiology in order to work in a
straightforward, quantitative field. But later career developments
would pique her interest in less conventional research fare.

As a chief resident at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York,
Briggs realized that she wanted more research training to pursue an
academic career. She did a postdoc at Yale School of Medicine, working
with the early leaders in evidence-based medicine, and spent six years
as a research scientist at the University of Munich in Germany. Later,
in the University of Michigan's nephrology division, she developed her
clinical skills. She and husband Jurgen Schnermann studied the renal
hormone system that helps regulate blood pressure.

She was soon made director of the kidney, urological and
haematological diseases division of the National Institute of Diabetes
and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). While overseeing clinical
trials, she noticed large placebo effects and wanted to explore them
further. She had started organizing a conference on placebo effects
when she discovered that NCCAM director Straus was doing the same;
together, they published the conference proceedings and Briggs began
to explore mind-body medicine.

She now wants to develop novel clinical-trial designs -- able to detect
even subtle effects -- to test alternative treatments. "Many people are
using these therapies, often in large amounts, and the NIH needs to do
a good job of researching them," Briggs says. Kirschstein expects
Briggs's background will help her better integrate complementary
therapies into conventional medicine.

CV
2006-08: Senior scientific officer, Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
Chevy Chase, Maryland

1997-2006: Director, Division of Kidney, Urologic and Hematologic
Diseases, NIDDK, Bethesda, Maryland

1993-97: Professor, Departments of Internal Medicine and Physiology,
University of Michigan


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