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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Americans Broaden Concepts of Medicine
  • Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 13:17:57 -0600


Americans Broaden Concepts of Medicine
>From Prayer to Massage Therapy, Treatments Expand
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0528-08.htm
Published on Friday, May 28, 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle


Drawing from a long list of "alternative" medical therapies as diverse as the
Atkins diet, acupuncture, homeopathy and prayer, federal health researchers
reported Thursday that nearly two out of three Americans were using
unconventional approaches to mend their bodies or maintain their health.

When prayer is dropped from the list, the federally funded survey found that
36 percent of Americans over the age of 18 used so-called complementary and
alternative medicine.

"What we see is that a sizable percentage of the public puts their personal
health into their own hands,'' said Edward Sondik, director of the federal
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health
Statistics, which carried out the survey.

A snapshot of American health care choices in 2002, the survey concluded that
8 percent of the nation's adults visited chiropractors; 5 percent practiced
yoga for health; 1.1 percent had acupuncture; and 1.7 percent employed
homeopathy.

The wildly popular Atkins diet, one of several listed as therapies in the
survey, was tried by only 1.7 percent of those surveyed -- but the study was
conducted in 2002, just as the national craze for high-protein, low-
carbohydrate foods was igniting.

The survey of 31,000 Americans was conducted at a cost of $3 million over a
two-year period and is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind, said
study author Richard Nahin of the National Center for Complementary and
Alternative Medicine, an arm of the National Institutes of Health.

Skeptics of alternative medicine nevertheless questioned the scientific value
of the survey. "I can't imagine why someone would invest so much money for
something that has no significance whatsoever,'' said Dr. Stephen Barrett, a
retired Pennsylvania psychiatrist who runs the Web site Quackwatch
(www.quackwatch.com).

A frequent critic of the NIH alternative medicine program, Barrett said it
made no sense to include activities such as prayer under the rubric of
alternative medicine. "Praying for one's own health is not an alternative
medicine,'' he said. "Everyone who prays, prays for their own health."

Therapies such as massage, which are labeled as alternative medicine, are
often used by mainstream medical practices, Barrett noted. Hypnosis and
"progressive relaxation," also on the survey list, are techniques used by
conventional psychotherapists.

Unlike earlier surveys that relied on telephone interviews, the federal study
required that researchers visit the homes of respondents, who were asked
during a 10-minute segment of a larger health survey about their experiences
with a list of 27 different alternative therapies.

The findings are consistent with those of smaller surveys of America's health
care preferences, such as the work of Harvard Medical School researcher Dr.
David Eisenberg, who has reported the prevalence of complementary and
alternative medicine in the United States has risen to 42 percent, from 33
percent in 1990.

The federal survey broadened the previous academic work by including prayer
in the alternative medicine mix. It found 43 percent of Americans had prayed
for their own health during 2002; 24 percent reported that other people had
prayed for them; and nearly 10 percent had been in a group that prayed for
health.

The NIH study was released at a time when the federal government's premier
medical research center is under pressure from religious conservatives
offended by some of its studies of human sexuality. Nahin said that there had
been no pressure from the Bush administration to add prayer to the list of
survey questions.

"The survey instrument was developed prior to when President Bush took
office,'' he said.

Dr. William Stewart, medical director for the Institute for Health and
Healing at California Pacific Medical Center, said there was a growing body
of scientific work suggesting that prayer does have a beneficial healing
effect. "Most people who have a cancer diagnosis now engage in some sort of
social support activity,'' he said. "If we look at prayer as a support
network, it could contribute to the well-being and healing of an individual.''

Stewart said he was concerned that surveys such as this one tended to lump
all kinds of alternative medicine practices into one group, without much
rationale for doing so. However, he said the larger picture painted by the
study showed that "30 percent or more Americans say the spiritual aspects of
treatment are important."

"That,'' Stewart concluded, "is a very important and salient consideration
for us physicians.''





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