David M. Eisenberg, M.D., of Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, conducted the survey which reported that one out of every three Americans seeks relief for health problems by going outside of mainstream medicine, especially for backaches, headaches, and stress.
The study was based on a random national phone survey of 1,539 adults about the use of therapies in 1990. Therapies included in the survey in order of use were: relaxation techniques, chiropractic, massage, imagery, spiritual healing, commercial weight-loss programs, lifestyle diets (i.e., macrobiotics), herbal medicine, megavitamins, self-help groups, energy healing, biofeedback, hypnosis, homeopathy, acupuncture, and folk remedies.
Americans currently are spending an estimated $10-14 billion annually on AHC, or one-sixteenth of the total health care market. White Americans, 25-49 years old, living in the western states, are the most frequent users of AHC.
While the majority of the respondents had also seen an MD during the year, one-quarter of the patients had sought AHC practitioners without ever visiting an MD. The frequency of visits to AHC providers was also surprising: twelve percent said they sought AHC treatment an average of 19 times during the year with an average cost of $27.60 per visit. One telling statistic: Seventy percent of AHC is paid for out-of-pocket.
The American Chiropractic Association President John Pammer, D.C., asserted these figures were proof of the dissatisfaction with conventional medicine and its high per-visit costs compared with alternative methods of care. "Obviously chiropractic works, or people wouldn't be willing to forego reimbursement," said Dr. Pammer.
Another curious statistic: of those seeing an MD for a particular condition, 28 percent sought treatment from an AHC provider for the same condition, and 72 percent of those did not tell their MD of the alternative care!
"Curiouser and curiouser," to quote Mr. Lewis Carroll.
While the New England Journal of Medicine study did not report on the effectiveness of AHC therapies, Dr. Pammer pointed to two scientific studies done by medical sources: the Cherkin study that compared chiropractic care to medical/physical therapy (nonsurgical care) of the back and neck, showing that chiropractic relieves chronic and severe pain, both immediate and long term, in half the time it takes medical physicians; and the Meade study (published in the June 1990 British Medical Journal), which emphasized the effectiveness of chiropractic treatment.
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