Meet four alumni and a professor who help people by practicing "alternative" health care.

Acupuncture

Homeopathy. Naturopathy. Holistic medicine. Chiropractic. Acupuncture. Hypnotherapy. These words have become rather mainstream as alternative, or complementary, health care has risen in the public mind and esteem. Numerous clinical studies give evidence of the effectiveness of acupuncture, chiropractic, and other so-called "nontraditional" (although they have rich and long histories) health care practices. Some well-respected medical schools, such as that at Tufts University, are starting to train traditional doctors to understand complementary medicine practices.

As policy makers, ever pragmatic and concerned with cost efficiency, learn more about its successes, integrative health care has become a focus of federal public health efforts. Funding for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health has grown steadily. And the public wants it to continue. The NIH estimates that alternative health care is a $21-billion-a-year industry. About a third of Americans visit an alternative practitioner at least once a year (we'd love to hear from you if you are one of them), and this percentage is likely to increase.

Here we introduce five alternative health care providers with IC connections, scattered across the country from Ithaca to Phoenix:

• acupuncturist Clayton Spivey '70
• massage therapist and bodyworker Sandy Kauffman Anderson '83
• Chinese therapies specialist Don Myers '84
• chiropractor Chris Colloca '90
• hypnotherapist/speech-language pathology professor Richard Schissel.

Besides having Ithaca College in common, they share a devotion to healing and a passion for patients.