Clinical Investigation
Characteristics and Health Perceptions of Complementary and Alternative Medicine Users in the United States

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Abstract

Background

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use has been increasing and these unconventional therapies do have important adverse effects. We evaluated predictors of CAM use among U.S. adults.

Methods

We analyzed the 2007 Health Information National Trends Survey (n = 7503) and used logistic regression models to evaluate the association of demographic, lifestyle characteristics and healthcare perceptions of respondents who used CAM within the previous 12 months (n = 1980) versus those who did not (n = 5523). We used survey weights in all analyses and performed variance estimations using Taylor series linearization to account for the complex survey design.

Results

Females (odds ratio [OR] = 1.46; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.15  1.86), college graduates (OR = 1.61; 95% CI: 1.24  2.08) and those who considered the quality of their healthcare to be poor (OR = 2.16; 95% CI: 1.28  3.65) were more likely to use CAM, whereas blacks (OR = 0.58; 95% CI: 0.39  0.85) were less likely to use CAM. Among CAM users, 47.6% did not inform their doctors. However, no factor predicted those who did not inform their doctors of their CAM use.

Conclusions

Many adults in the United States use CAM without informing their doctors. Care providers should inquire about CAM usage from their patients, document them and counsel their patients regarding their use of these less regulated therapies.

Section snippets

METHODS

We obtained approval for this study from the Institutional Review Board of Howard University, Washington DC, and downloaded the publicly available de-identified data of the National Cancer Institute's 2007 Health Information National Trends Surveys (HINTS). The detail of HINTS 2007 has been published.3 In brief, HINTS was a survey containing questions about health-related information. The 2007 iteration was conducted between January 2008 and May 2008. Two modes of data collection were used:

RESULTS

The weighted total population estimate, N = 220,549,842. Overall, the mean age of the participants in this study was 45.7 years (95% confidence interval: 45.6-45.8 years), 51.2% were females, 69.6% non-Hispanic whites, 11.3% non-Hispanic blacks, 12.8% Hispanics, 29.7% were obese, 21.5% were current smokers, 82.7% had health insurance and 14.1% were born outside the United States. Of the 7,503 participants in this study, 1980 (25.1%) respondents used CAM in the previous 12 months. When compared with

DISCUSSION

In this study, we evaluated the demographics, lifestyle characteristics and health perceptions of nationally representative adults in the United States with respect to CAM use in the previous 12 months. Our study suggests that approximately a quarter of U.S. adults used CAM in the previous year; however, about one half of CAM users do not inform their doctors. It is very important for care providers to be aware of this and make direct inquiry about the use of CAM from their patients during

CONCLUSIONS

Approximately, a quarter of U.S. adults engage in CAM use and approximately half of CAM users do not discuss their use with their doctors, making it imperative that care providers should endeavor to constantly inquire about the use of these unconventional therapies directly from their patients.

REFERENCES (11)

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Dr. Laiyemo is supported by a grant award from the National Center for Advancing Translational Science, the National Institutes of Health (Grant KL2TR000102 and UL1RT000101).

The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

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