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Michael
S. Goldstein, Ph.D. Professor, UCLA Department of Sociology and School of Public Health - Department of Community Health Sciences |
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Contact Information Department
of Community Health Sciences
Dr. Goldstein received his Ph.D. from Brown University and has conducted research on a wide array of topics dealing with the behavior of people with chronic illness. At UCLA he teaches graduate-level courses on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and Self-Help and Self-Care. Dr. Goldstein's published research on CAM goes back over twenty-five years when his analysis of the changing relationship of chiropractic and conventional medicine was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. During the late 1980s he conducted research on the factors that led some conventionally-trained physicians to become involved with CAM. This series of studies, ranging from small, qualitative accounts based on in-depth interviews, to larger studies of national organizations revealed that the physician's own personal experiences with illness and/or spirituality were important factors differentiating them from more conventionally-inclined colleagues. In the early 1990s, Dr. Goldstein conducted research for two years at The Wellness Community, a freestanding support center for people with cancer that is receptive to many forms of CAM. In several papers emerging from this work, Goldstein and his co-authors demonstrated the interaction of both individual and situational factors in determining who benefits and finds satisfaction in such groups. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Goldstein was among the very first researchers supported by the Office of Alternative Medicine for his study of patient satisfaction with homeopathic treatment. More recently, Dr. Goldstein has collaborated on a study to compare the impact of treatment confidence on pain and disability among patients with low-back pain treated by either physicians or chiropractors. Currently, Dr. Goldstein is Co-PI and Project Director of a large (n=6000+) NCI funded study of CAM use among Californians with and without chronic illness. Over the past few years, Dr. Goldstein has written a number of review articles on CAM including one in the latest edition of The Handbook of Medical Sociology. Dr. Goldstein is the author of two books: The Health Movement: Promoting Fitness in America (Macmillan 1992), and Alternative Health Care: Medicine, Miracle, or Mirage? (Temple Univ. 1999). Both aim to understand changes in the way people seek to prevent and respond to serious illnesses like cancer, as part of broader social and cultural changes in American society.
Selected References Goldstein MS, Morgenstern H, Hurwitz EC, Yu F. The impact of treatment confidence on pain and related disability among patients with low-back pain: results from the UCLA Low-Back Pain Study. Spine. In press. Goldstein MS. Alternative Health Care: Medicine, Miracle or Mirage? Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press; 1999. Goldstein MS. Complementary and alternative medicine: its emerging role in the field of oncology. The Journal of Psychosocial Oncology. In press.
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