A smarter kind of consumer - judging alternative medicine - Brief Article

Nutrition Health Review,  Summer, 2002  by Jessie Gruman

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One assumption about the growth of alternative medicine in recent years has been that patients have become active consumers, no longer just passive recipients of needles, pills, and bed rest. On this assumption rests a $31 billion-a-year business attracting more than 40 percent of all patients.

But is there a real difference in how patients behave based on whether their practitioner is "conventional" or "alternative?" From a pragmatic perspective, there is no alternative medicine and there is no conventional medicine. There is only what works--what is scientifically proven to reliably reduce pain, cure or control disease, and improve the quality of life--and what does not. Most alternative procedures, drugs, and devices have not been subjected to this test.

I suspect that alternative medicine may simply be another choice that people make to glow themselves to maintain a familiar passivity toward their health--looking for a new quick fix rather than taking the initiative to refuse that second doughnut, walk to the movies instead of drive, or finish the full course of antibiotics twice a day on an empty stomach.

At a time when all of medicine is being called to account for its effectiveness through rigorous scientific evaluation, alternative medicine must expect the same. This means that the knowledge and practices constituting alternative medicine must become agreed upon, systematized, and evaluated.

Patients, too, must learn how to evaluate evidence. Are we really seeing a rise in health consumerism, or does the public's apparent infatuation with alternative medicine signal something else? Is it a matter of distrust of authoritarian physicians, or perhaps a reaction against the unfulfilled promises of biomedicine, leading to a new search for miracles that can cure all disease and halt aging?

For health behavior researchers, the challenge is to figure out just what it is about alternative medicine that makes it so attractive. The answers can become the foundation for creating both a smarter kind of health system and a smarter kind of consumer.

Adapted with permission

Jessie Gruman, Executive Director, Center for the Advancement of Health

COPYRIGHT 2002 Vegetus Publications
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group