Australian Research Consortium in Complementary and Integrative Medicine

Leading complementary medicine research, UTS: ARCCIM

Professor Jon Adams: Our centre’s focused on exploring and explaining a whole range of issues around what is a very significant health care and public health issue -the use of complementary medicines by the general public and different communities.

What’s important is the research and investigation that gets done around the world on complementary medicine use and practice actually reflects what happens in daily routine care.

That’s something that’s very much at the heart of our program and all of our initiatives and projects. Our unique research program is built upon four major components:

1. critical perspectives,
2. established methods and methodology,
3. transdisciplinary approach, and
4. rigorous research design.

Our established research program explores and examines a diverse range of substantive topics and methodological areas – 11 in total.

Examples are:

• healthy ageing,
• chronic illness,
• vulnerable and underserved communities, and
• policy and regulation.

Our investigations with regards to all these substantive topics have led to great success in providing insights of impact for both practitioners, policymakers and other stakeholders beyond academia.

Professor David Sibbritt: Here in our centre, we’re highly interested in population health studies.

Part of our research focus is to look at large cohort studies and national health surveys that have been conducted around the world. Having research at such scale provides us with huge insights for not only government but also practitioners and the general population.

We’re also conducting a lot of research on complementary medicine use here in Australia.

We’ve had a long-term involvement with the Australian longitudinal study of women’s health, and also the 45 and Up study.

Dr Jane Frawley: I was in practice for over 10 years, and I’m really excited that my experience from that time now directly influences the research that we do here at the centre.

So here at the centre we endeavour to create research that’s really relevant to practitioners and patients.

Professor Jon Adams: We truly hope to see that complementary medicine and its investigation can become a mainstream part of most disciplinary health research topics, so we can draw upon public
health, health services research, clinical investigation, and many other disciplines to really, truly subject this topic to assessment and evaluation that’s objective, that’s non-partisan, and that’s seen as being highly scientific and rigorous.

Our research centre is the only one in the world that’s predominantly and exclusively focused upon a critical public health perspective looking at this very important area of healthcare.