The Foundation for Alternative and Integrative Medicine (FAIM) was launched with a mission to identify breakthrough complementary and alternative therapies and to research and report on their effectiveness.

FAIM's mission also places importance upon the affordability of treatments in the belief that the world needs cost-effective solutions to bring health to the greatest number of people.

FAIM is headquartered in Loveland, CO. In its first nine years of existence, it has identified and evaluated more than 200 clinics from 20 countries offering complementary and alternative treatments. The information FAIM collects is shared with the scientific community through an international network of contacts and conferences.

FAIM's mission is nothing less than to create, step by step, a revolution in worldwide healthcare.

History

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FAIM photo

Ceremony in Lima, Peru honoring FAIM Chairman Berkley Bedell (far left), with FAIM International Field Coordinator Ferdinando Pisani (second from left); International Relations Director Pierre Garrigue Miranda (second from right); and Dr. Martha Villar, CAM Director EsSulad Hospitals (far right).

Businessman and retired Congressman Berkley Bedell founded the Foundation for Alternative and Integrative Medicine in 1998.

Personal experience led him to develop a passion for alternative medicine as he was helped – not once, but twice – by therapies that had been overlooked by mainstream medicine.

Mr. Bedell used his influence in Washington to bring attention to the need for investigating potential breakthrough treatments for public health. With Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), he created the Office of Alternative Medicine within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate and validate promising alternative therapies. Despite this milestone, their efforts were frustrated by bureaucratic and scientific inertia.

After years of working with the scientific establishment through NIH to promote the scientific investigation of alternative and complementary medicine, Mr. Bedell became convinced that the government was unable to adequately pursue innovative field investigations of these treatments. With his wife, Elinor, he founded FAIM to ensure that potentially life-saving ideas would receive the scientific attention they deserved.