David Geffen School of Medicine faculty, representing a wide range of disciplines, engaged speakers nationally known for their expertise on complementary, alternative and integrative medicine (CAIM) and its investigation at a January, 2008 symposium on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. The forum was created to educate the UCLA Institutional Review Board (IRB), and lively participation by School of Medicine faculty helped bring IRB members up to speed on controversies surrounding CAIM research. The symposium demonstrated that academics who are neither proponents nor detractors of CAIM can facilitate cross talk between opposing camps, elucidating questions important to its evaluation by those charged with protecting research subjects. It also brought attention to the universality of quandaries facing CAIM investigators and to the ingenuity with which they have addressed many of them.