Dr. Ren is also an assistant professor of pediatrics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. At last year's North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference in Qu bec, Canada, Dr. Ren held a workshop about the potential benefits of green tea as a CF treatment. Dr. Ren's special interests are pulmonary inflammation in CF, asthma, pneumonia, bronchoscopy, as well as complementary and alternative medicine.
Alternative medicine ranges from enhancing workouts to treating depression and chronic back pain.
As a result, most CAM therapies do not have extensive scientific backing to validate claims of effectiveness. Each CAM therapy has its own distinct theory and practice, and many practitioners combine elements of more than one CAM in their treatments. In the United States, estimates indicate that there are about 90 commonly used CAM therapies. Instead, CAM has a larger and a more defined theoretical foundation applied to the overall treatment of disease. Today, such treatments are considered complementary or alternative because they are not supported by the same amount of controlled data that traditional western medications have behind them.