Focus on Alternative and Complementary Therapies
www.pharmpress.com/fact
Focus Alternat Complement Ther©2005 Pharmaceutical Press
Focus Altern Complement Ther 2005; 10: 169–70
Adriane Fugh Berman, MD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington, DC, USA, where she teaches courses on Medical History and Herbs and Nutritional Supplements in the first basic sciences master’s programme in CAM in the USA. Dr Fugh Berman also consults on herbs and dietary supplements for the nonprofit-making Reproductive Toxicology Center, the Federal Trade Commission and other federal and state agencies.
Previously, Dr Fugh-Berman was employed at the Contraception and Reproductive Health Branch, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH and the Office of Alternative Medicine (now the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, NIH). She was the medical director of two CAM clinics in Washington, DC. A GP, Dr Fugh Berman graduated from Georgetown University School of Medicine and did a family practice internship in the Residency Program in Social Medicine at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, New York.
Dr Fugh Berman is the author of 5-Minute Herb and Dietary Supplement Consult (Lippincott, Williams and Williams, 2003) and Alternative Medicine: What Works (Williams and Wilkins, 1997). Her articles have appeared in The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, Reproductive Toxicology and many other academic and consumer publications. An internationally known speaker who addresses both professional and consumer audiences, Dr Fugh Berman has made television appearances on 20/20, the Today Show and Nightline.
Q What part of your work gives you the most pleasure?
AFB: Writing, when it’s going well.
Q What advice would you give to someone going into CAM?
AFB: Be critical and ethical. Work for the health of the public, not corporations. Never criticise someone’s personal experience, but don’t make policy or public health decisions based on personal experience. Data rules! I suppose that advice applies to any field…
Q What is the greatest danger to CAM?
AFB: The stranglehold that pharmaceutical companies have over the minds of physicians. In the USA at least, conventional medicine is a prostitute to industry. For-profit health care is an oxymoron. CAM and conventional medicine can only be rationally integrated within a national health system.
Q Which form of CAM would you refuse to use?
AFB: The sort of acupuncture where needles are broken off inside you, the sort of moxibustion in which one is deliberately burned, aristolochic acid-containing herbs, rebirthing, fasting, group exercise or anything that involves instruments up the bum.
Q What is your biggest regret?
AFB: Not having studied languages seriously.
Q How would you like to be remembered?
AFB: As a good cook.
Q What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
AFB: Unavoidable bad things happen, so avoid optional pain. Dance between funerals.
Q Which do you believe is the most overrated virtue?
AFB: Politeness.
Q Which word do you overuse most?
AFB: Like. A bad habit left over from adolescence. Perhaps it, like, makes me seem younger.
Q What makes you happy?
AFB: Gardening. Laughing with friends. Eating fabulous food.
Q What do you deplore in others?
AFB: Hypocrisy. And selfishness.
Q What do you deplore in yourself?
AFB: Absentmindedness, and my utter incompetence with mechanical and electronic devices.
Q What is your favourite book/film?
AFB: I’m absurdly stumped by this question. It feels oddly threatening to pick a favourite book or even author. The authors I am most attached to include Iris Murdoch, George Eliot, Robertson Davies, Jane Austen, AS Byatt, William Thackery and Margaret Atwood.
Q Which is your favourite quote?
AFB: Never be afraid to speak out, even if you are a minority of one (my mother, Aline Fugh Berman).
Q Why do you think people like you?
AFB: I think people find me amusing because I say things that they’re secretly thinking but won’t say.
Q What was the most embarrassing moment in your life?
AFB: OK, I’m not answering this one!
Q If you were invited on the Jerry Springer show, why would this be?
AFB: What’s the Jerry Springer show?
