University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Jan. 13, 2010 -- I'm Dr. Ronald Glick. I'm the medical director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at UPMC Shadyside, and we're involved with several research studies.

The first is a study on the use of acupuncture for the treatment for insomnia. Insomnia is a common problem that can cause quite a lot of disability and often doesn't respond very well to some of the medications or other therapy approaches. Acupuncture has shown to be helpful in the Chinese medicine literature, so we're doing a Western design study that will look at this more carefully to see to what extent acupuncture is actually of benefit in treating insomnia.

A second study is by Dr. Carol Greco, also from the Center for Integrative Medicine, and this is a study with lupus patients who also have depression. It's investigating the effect of a mind/body therapy approach. So this is a relaxation training approach to see how much benefit it will have for treating the depression as well as the other disease markers that go along with lupus.

A third study that we have going is -- and all of these are funded by the National Institutes of Health -- is looking at the effect of an injection therapy called prolotherapy for people who have chronic tennis elbow. And it turns out that, again, commonly people with tennis elbow have persistent symptoms that can be disabling and don't respond to other kinds of treatments, and this particular injection therapy may help the tissues to remodel and help ease up some of the chronic pain.