Millions of people are spending billions of dollars every year on complementary and alternative medicine.

Massage therapy, acupuncture and herbal supplements are some of popular forms of complementary and alternative treatments and the 100 million Americans who are turning to these treatments are spending nearly $30 billion to do so.

But right now, many alternative therapies that claim to work have never been tested or proved. Dr. Stephen E. Straus, director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, wants to put these practices through the best testing available so the public can then reap the benefits of those products and procedures that pass the tests.

Complementary and alternative medicine has a lot of controversy surrounding it that includes whether it should be studied at all and how it should be studied. In the context of thinking about how to do research, the question is, 'what constitutes ethical research in complementary medicine?'"

Congress has appropriated $117 million toward alternative medicine research this year. A special report written by Straus was recently published in the "Journal of the American Medical Association." The report addresses the importance of studying complementary and alternative treatments and how to make sure that the research is ethical.

"It's our responsibility to be creative as we are in conventional medicine and to constantly use the very most stringent scientific tools that can be brought to bear on any single question," Straus said. "If we ignore the complementary and alternative practices, we do so at the risk of denying ourselves good therapies and even better therapies in the future."