Understanding the Use of Complementary and Alternative Health Care

The use of complementary and alternative health has been steadily increasing in the United States (Eisenberg, Ettner, Appel, Wilkey, Van Rompay, & Keesler, 1998). For many clients with chronic conditions, mainstream medical care offers few options. Long-term treatments with medications often produce their own iatrogenic (treatment-caused) health problems, some of which are as troubling to the individual as the original disease process. A common response to these problems has been to add more medications and more treatments, each with its own potential adverse effects. Mainstream health care providers often give little attention to the problems of daily living that are of greatest concern to the individual. Stress and anxiety also add to the burden of these clients. For clients with acute health conditions, certain treatments or medications may produce unpleasant or harmful side effects. Clients often are looking for alternative treatment methods that do not appear to have the same potential for harm. Some alternative therapies have been available for many years, and there are people who believe that they have been significantly helped by these approaches. Unfortunately, traditional health care providers often have dismissed these therapies without investigating them thoroughly. On the other hand, few alternative therapies have been formally researched, and proponents often rely on undocumented reports of effectiveness.
Research into alternative therapies now is supported by the federal government but only in a small way compared to other research. The federal government has an Office of Alternative Health Care and a Web page of references, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. (See list of Web sites.) More attention is being paid to the responses of individuals. Concern about the role of stress in illness has prompted an increased openness to nonmedical methods of managing stress. The possibility of alternative care practices working in a complementary fashion with traditional medical care is gaining wider acceptance. Often these complementary therapies are used to address the whole person and not simply the disease. Part of the appeal of alternative health care is the caring and personalized response that clients often receive. People who have been intimidated by businesslike clinics and made to feel unimportant by impersonal professionals may find that the warm, concerned, accepting atmosphere of the nonconventional setting meets many personal needs. The fact that stress and anxiety play a major role in any health problem may help explain why many people are helped by therapies that may not be based on sound scientific knowledge. To learn more about any specific therapy, or to research alternative and complementary therapies for any condition, you can use the CAM Citation Index found on the Web site of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (see references). You may also use MEDLINE at the National Library of Medicine to research various therapies.