Evidence-based Medicine is at the cornerstone of the approach to treatment and at the centre of this evidence is clinical trials. To do this properly costs millions of what pounds/Dollars/Euros.
In contrast complementary medicines lack this rigour of assessment and it is perhaps not surprising that they often never go anywhere as the supportive data is rubbish….or to be kind.”not good enough”.
Where there are no treatments available these approaches may seem to be the option but in MS there are many treatments where pharma has been made to do alot to get the evidence….Sadly this means that few academics are going to get too excited about poorly performed under resourced studies.
This is the problem. If they can’t make money from it, the complementary medicines will find it difficult to become established. I guess cannabis was one complementary medicine we were involved with and this had a pharma behind it…but its wide spread use is still more limited than one might expect, but on the back of this we have also sorts of chancers springing up to sell you cannabidiol-based products. We all will try things to help our ailments. It is a shame there is not an easy way to develop them, but as we see with the failure of CCSVI it can also cost millions to investigate, what turned out to be a scientific donkey.
Lopez-Alcalde J, Yan Y, Canella C, Barth J, Steinemann N, von Wyl V, Baum C, Bolt S, Haegele-Link S, Grob GR, Tietjen AK, Álvarez-Díaz N, Witt CM. Complementary therapies for multiple sclerosis: Scoping review with evidence gap map. Mult Scler Relat Disord. 2026 May 12;111:107243.
Background: A systematic visual presentation of clinical research on complementary therapies for people with multiple sclerosis (pwMS) can support clinical decisions and guide future research.
Objectives: To identify the interventions and outcomes evaluated in systematic reviews (SRs) and randomized clinical trials (RCTs) of complementary therapies for pwMS.
Methods: Scoping review searching four databases for RCTs (any date) and SRs (since 2017). Results were presented in an evidence and gap map (EGM).
Results: The map displayed 63 complementary therapies, 30 outcomes of a core outcome set (COS) and 83 studies (46 SRs, 37 RCTs) published from 1977 to 2023. Most trials were small (26 (70.2%) had 100-200 participants) and conducted in Europe (n = 28; 75.6%). Natural products (n = 57 studies) and mind-body therapies (n = 12) were the most frequent groups of interventions. Cannabis (n = 24) and vitamins (n = 15) were the most frequent individual therapies. For 65.1% of the 63 listed interventions, there were no RCTs or SRs. Seventeen (56.7%) of the 30 core outcomes had fewer than five studies. Seven outcomes (23.3%) were not evaluated. The most frequent outcomes were ability to work/perform daily activities (n = 40 studies), safety (n = 37), health-related quality of life (n = 32), and fatigue (n = 31).
Conclusions: This overview of RCTs and SRs of complementary therapies for pwMS indicates that the available research is scarce, with many interventions and outcomes unevaluated. Future RCTs should be adequately powered to assess outcomes relevant to pwMS. Efforts should be made to integrate research from non-Western studies to inform decisions.
Source: multiple-sclerosis-research.org