Chinese medicine expert Karen Lam has felt more acceptance in recent years.

Vancouver library worker Todd Wong knows better than most that life occasionally delivers a rude surprise. In 1989, Wong came back from a trip to New York feeling rundown. At first, his doctor diagnosed a recurrent viral flu. Only after visiting an oncologist did Wong, then 29 years old, learn that he had a germ-cell tumour related to testicular cancer. It required emergency chemotherapy to deal with a growth in his chest the size of a large grapefruit.

“The first night I’m in the hospital, the doctor tells my parents, ”˜There is a 60-percent chance your son will survive because we only discovered this very, very late,’ ” Wong told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview. “I was 29 years old, really active, and the doctors never suspected anything.”

Wong, a fifth-generation Chinese Canadian, was visited regularly by his mother, who wanted to give her son therapeutic touching to help him heal. She asked about doing energy work known as Reiki, because this is what she had practised at home. “The doctor told her, ”˜If you want to do that, you can take your son out of the hospital,’ ” Wong recalled.

His mother kept coming to the hospital every night to surreptitiously practise Reiki on her son, and Wong’s grandmother brought affirmations from a book by Louise Hay called You Can Heal Your Life. Later, he called a psychology instructor at Capilano College (now Capilano University) to learn how to practise visualization. When he was well enough to attend Simon Fraser University, every course he took had a focus on illness and health. “I did directed studies on the relationship between stress and illness,” Wong said. “I learned that psychoneuroimmunology [study of the interaction between psychological processes and the nervous and immune systems] was only coined as a term in 1980.”

Two decades after Wong’s recovery, he sees much greater cooperation taking place between allopathic and complementary health practitioners. The B.C. Cancer Agency is backing a complementary medicine education and outcomes program, which is examining how to safely combine complementary approaches with traditional cancer treatments. The team, led by principal researcher and UBC nursing professor Lynda Balneaves, is exploring the most effective ways to support cancer patients in making decisions in this area. In addition, the researchers hope to enhance health professionals’ understanding of this area.

Meanwhile, the U.S.–based National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which is part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has been conducting scientific research on complementary and alternative healing practices for 10 years. It also trains researchers in this area and disseminates information to allopathic practitioners. For example, it has noted that acupuncture has demonstrable therapeutic benefits for low back pain, and that tai chi may benefit older adults with osteoarthritis in the knee.

During his recovery, Wong visited naturopath and acupuncturist Larry Chan, one of the founders of Integrative Healing Arts on Vancouver’s West Side, who helped him think “outside the box” about the origins of illness. Wong is convinced that health is about finding balance and looking at the body system in a holistic framework rather than focusing exclusively on germs or viruses. Integrative is one of several facilities—including the Broadway Wellness Centre, Cross Roads Clinics, and Finlandia Natural Pharmacy and Health Centre—that offer an interdisciplinary and complementary approach to health care.