42% of Americans Use Alternative Medicine

It’s no longer a question of when alternative medicine will enter the mainstream of American health care. It’s now a matter of how much it will dominate the entire medical spectrum.

A new telephone poll of 1,500 Americans reveals that: 42% have used some form of alternative medicine therapy; 45% are willing to pay more in insurance premiums to have access to alternative care; and 67% regard the availability of such care in their insurance plans as a key criteria in choosing a plan. The results were released by Landmark Healthcare, a three-million member managed alternative care company based in Sacramento, California.

The study respondents were 66% women and 85% Caucasian, 56% were 25-54 years old, 47% had a college education, and 49% had an income from $20,000-$60,000.

The Landmark study also reported that among all the alternative medicine modalities, acupuncture and chiropractic have the greatest "unaided name recognition" and that, in 1997, the two most widely used forms of alternative medicine were herbal therapy (17%) and chiropractic (16%).

When interview subjects were asked which therapies they were most likely to use in the near future, 80% said massage and/or vitamins, 76% said herbs, and 73% chiropractic. For 40%, their attitudes about alternative medicine have grown more positive since 1993, mainly due to a favorable personal experience with it as a patient.

Landmark also revealed that 74% of those who use alternative medicine use it along with conventional medicine, and 61% stated they had informed their conventional doctors about their use of alternative therapies. Landmark reported that 85% of respondents self-prescribed their own herbs, 79% their own vitamins, and 73% their own homeopathic remedies. Finally, 30%
said their visits to conventional doctors had been reduced since starting alternative care.

SOURCE- The Landmark Report on Public Perceptions of Alternative Care(1998). Landmark Healthcare, Inc. 1750 Howe Ave., Suite 300, Sacramento, CA 95825; tel: 800-638-4557