Ancient Art of Qigong Eases Arthritic Joints

That won over most of the white coats in the audience, says Cohen, who has practiced qigong (pronounced "chee-gung") for 35 years and has earned degrees from Queens College and the University of Calfiornia, Berkeley.

He now directs the Qigong Research & Practice Center in Nederland, Colo.

Still, he knows there are skeptics.

"They'll say if they haven't learned it in medical school in 1950, it's not valid," he says. "Those people, as I like to say, are passing away from hardening of the paradigm.

"The data is clear: Qigong is clearly applicable for disease prevention, as an adjunctive therapy for treatment and for general well-being. ... It's hard for physicians to refute it."

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, cites 2,000 studies showing qigong's benefits. But the nonprofit organization cautions that most of the reports were published in Chinese as abstracts and, therefore, close scrutiny of the data cannot be done.

It calls the studies "largely anecdotal case series and not randomized controlled trials. Few studies have been conducted outside China and reported in peer-review journals in English. There have been no large clinical trials."