Complementary Medicine is More Commonly Used in Middle-Age

 

Wake Forest University School of Medicine (based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina) has recently published the report of a survey which shows that the most common group of people likely to turn to complementary medicines and alternative therapies is middle-aged adults. A group of more than 30,000 adults participated in the survey with questions based around the use of 28 complementary medicines in the 12 months previous.

A common view might have been that older and more inform adults would be most likely to look at complementary medicine for health improvement but the survey results did not bear this out.  One theory for this is that the complementary and alternative medicines and therapies have only started gaining significant popularity in more recent decades and therefore, older people have been less exposed to them. Another theory is that many people may simply view their health issues as a sign of age and therefore are not motivated to seek assistance, medical or otherwise.

Another result of the survey was that ethnicity had no bearing on the use of complementary medicine but the survey questions were not geared to finding out whether belief principles of different ethnic groups had a bearing.