By Julie Rovner

WASHINGTON (Reuters Health) – While alternative therapies to fight against potential bioterror agents need more study and may be able to complement existing medical treatments, they are not yet a viable alternative to more mainstream modalities, experts told a House committee Wednesday.

"While augmenting one's natural healing powers may prove beneficial for some illnesses…there is no scientific basis to believe that this approach would be of much value in the context of virulent diseases incited by biological weapons," Dr. Stephen Straus, director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) told the House Government Reform Committee.

Dr. Wayne Jonas, former director of the NCCAM, an office of the National Institutes of Health, told the committee that a study he conducted in mice found that homeopathic treatment (in which a minute amount of a toxin is given to stimulate an immune response) for tularemia reduced mortality by 22%.

But even Jonas, who called for more research, warned that some internet purveyors of products like essential oils and colloidal silver are making bioterrorism-related claims that lack evidence. "While silver products are used to suppress infection in burns, oral silver has not been shown to be effective against infection and is toxic to humans in moderate doses," he testified. Further, he said, "while many oils have mild anti-viral, anti-bacterial or anti-fungal properties, none has been proven to irradiate the infections of concern in bioterrorism."

And while some natural substances may be of aid in helping offset side effects of antibiotics used to treat infections, others may do more harm than good. "It may not even be prudent to combine such natural products with antibiotics because of the possibility that they would interfere with the proper metabolism and action of the drugs," Straus told the committee.

Several committee members, including Chairman Dan Burton, R-Ind., and Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, said they are unhappy that the government is not being more aggressive in finding potentially effective alternatives in case bioterror attacks leave the nation with a shortage of vaccines or antibiotics. "We should have a plan B," said Kucinich.

But Straus said that if such alternative treatments existed, they probably would have been found already. "Measles, yellow fever, cholera, bubonic plague, smallpox, typhus, syphilis, and tuberculosis, and HIV in the current era, have exterminated native peoples and forced wholesale migrations of populations," he said. "Had the traditional healing rituals and natural products available to pre-20th-century man been truly effective, our history would have been rather different."