DAYTON, Ohio (Cox News Service) - When patients with chronic pain can't find relief from their physicians, a lot of them turn to alternative practitioners.

In addition to highlighting conventional medicine's limitations, the trend also puts patients at risk if they don't tell their doctors about alternative therapies that could interact badly with prescription drugs, university researchers said last month.

In a survey of emergency-room patients who were able to walk, State University of New York-Stony Brook research indicated 56 percent of those with pain had used at least one alternative therapy and 87 percent had gotten some relief from it, but only 30 percent had told their physicians about it. Massage and chiropractic were the most popular alternative therapies, each used by at least 30 percent of the pain patients.

"People's needs maybe are not being met by conventional medicine, so we need to question ourselves what we are doing wrong," Dr. Adam J. Singer of the University Medical Center at SUNY-Stony Brook told Reuters Health.

One mistake is the general reluctance to use such opioid painkillers as morphine, University of Wisconsin Medical School researchers found. Patients can develop addictions to those drugs, or a tolerance that requires steady increases in dosage.

The potential for abuse is real, but it is not a reason for denying patients the drugs, Wisconsin researcher David E. Joranson told Reuters Health. Many people who could benefit from these painkillers aren't receiving them, he said.

"We suspect that patient access to opioid analgesics is so bad in some places that pain patients are checking themselves into methadone programs only to get pain management."

Meanwhile, the SUNY-Stony Brook study suggested the unsupervised use of herbal pain-killing medications constitute a danger that is not sufficiently recognized.

The emergency-room survey showed about one in four had tried herbal remedies. It's important for physicians to know about them, however, because their side effects can be confused with disease symptoms and because they can interact perilously with other medications.

As an example, the researchers said when herbal ginkgo biloba is used with some anticoagulant drugs, severe bleeding can result.

"We need to evaluate these alternative therapies scientifically," Singer said. "Those that are found to be effective should be embraced by conventional medicine and those that are found to be ineffective should be rejected by both conventional medicine and patients."

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