An Erskine fellow at the University of Canterbury, Prof Coulter is in Dunedin to give two public lectures and participate in establishing of a local group to proactively advocate for research into non-traditional health care and treatment.
Based in the United States, Prof Coulter was born in Timaru and has family ties to Dunedin.
Last night, he gave a public lecture at the Barnett Lecture Theatre in Dunedin Hospital and this evening he will take part in an effort to establish a Dunedin research advocacy group organised through the Integrative Health Trust Otago.
Prof Coulter said about 50% of New Zealand's population used alternative or complementary medicines, in line with similar percentage figures in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States.
He said a trend towards "real-world" medicinal research and away from random control trials (efficacy studies) was a positive move for advocates and opponents of alternative and complementary medicines because it would prove the case either way.
It would mean medicines and treatments, both conventional and alternative or complementary, were tested for comparative results to determine top performers.
Most medicines and treatments tested against a placebo had favourable results, but researchers using that method could not adequately determine which medicine or treatment was more effective than the other, he said.
"The problem with efficacy studies is we don't know if they'll work in the real world. Controlled trials factor out all sorts of things but when you look at the results you don't know if they will correlate in the treatment of a person walking into your practice," he said.
Pragmatic trials, termed comparative effective research, also studied the outcomes for patients and not just the focused effect on symptoms, he said.
"Cancer patients want to know whether they will live. The outcome in a cancer trial is usually about the tumour - has it shrunk? - and longevity is not the outcome measured," Prof Coulter said.
He said the more research conducted, the more uptake there might be in alternative or complementary medicine use.
"More people will use [complementary and alternative medicines] rather than less. The question needs to be: 'What is in the public interest?', and that [the answer] is safety first and effectiveness," he said.
Prof Coulter said those who opposed the use of non-traditional or conservative medicine should also be interested in its further exploration.
"If you think it's garbage you should be in favour of researching it, to disprove it," he said.
