Research update on complementary medicine

An interesting study has just been published through the Department of Economics at Tilburg University in The Netherlands about the cost effectiveness of complementary approaches to healthcare and the impact of their use on mortality rates.

Data was collected from the years 2006–2009 and 1913 conventional GP’s were compared with data from 79 GP’s using complementary approaches in addition to conventional healthcare. According to the researchers, patients whose GP had additional CAM training have 0-30% lower healthcare costs and mortality rates, depending on age groups and type of complementary medicine used. The lower costs resulted from fewer hospital stays and fewer prescription drugs.

As my previous blog entries have stated, I highlight complementary approaches as being just that – complementary and secondary rather than a primary means of dealing with healthcare, and so studies like this provide interesting reading in highlighting the potential inherent in using a number of different ideological approaches to dealing with patient care.

Full details here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21695547 

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