The Stephen E. Straus Distinguished Lecture in the Science of Complementary Health Therapies series was established to honor Dr. Straus, the founding director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Dr. Straus built a comprehensive research enterprise, championing the efforts to establish the efficacy and safety of CAM practices while upholding the rigorous standards of science for which the NIH is known. Under his leadership, CAM research at NIH grew threefold, facilitating his vision of an evidence-based integrative approach to health care for the benefit of the public. An internationally recognized scientist, Dr. Straus also held the position of senior investigator in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

When patients and families ask about health care decisions, there is often tremendous uncertainty about the best option. While biological science is unraveling the basis for health and disease and yielding a large number of therapeutic targets, ultimately, the assessment of which options are best for an individual or populations depends on empirical information derived from attempts to learn from observational studies or randomized trials. Until recently, the fragmented nature of the system for doing human research led to a large number of research, projects, the vast majority of which did not advance decision making or science.

The advent of “big data” allows us to unite patients, families, providers, administrators and researchers into networks that can deliver precisely selected cohorts for rare diseases and large populations for pragmatic clinical trials. The data fabric for these networks consists of clinical data from electronic health records and disease registries, financial and utilization data from enterprise data warehouses and individual data from patient reported outcome instruments, social media and biosensors. These data can now be combined with environmental data and social data using geospatial referencing.

Considerations about this system related to management of chronic pain will be discussed.

For more information go to https://nccam.nih.gov/news/events/lectures