Alternative Health Blog

The government knows about it, but a lot of doctors apparently do not. What are we talking about? 

That nearly two-thirds of all Americans 50 and older use complementary or alternative medicine therapies. But most of them—77 percent—don’t tell their doctors about it. The data arrives on the Alternative Health Blog’s virtual doorstep from a survey conducted by two big-name organizations, AARP (the org that changed to acronym only because the “retired persons” thing isn’t all that relevant anymore) and the federal National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (the once Office of Alternative Medicine that has expanded into a larger and more influential “center” at the National Institutes for Health).

What makes the results doubly insightful is that Americans at Boomer age and above not only use alternative therapies most frequently compared to other demographic slices, but they stay quiet about it in the highest percentages.

Let’s talk about that, shall we? Natural health practitioners will tell you they need to know whether you are taking prescription drugs as they develop a plan to help you heal without medications. The guess here is you tell them, in part because you want to eliminate or reduce the drugs and, well, because you don’t expect that practitioner to judge you.

But going eye to eye with a M.D., different story. You might think most of those people holding back alternative therapy info from the doc hesitate because they don’t want their healing remedy/dream/strategy to be dismissed. I certainly thought so.

Yet the AARP-NCCAM survey of 1,559 adults reported that only 12 percent of respondents gave this reason for icks-nay on the alt-nay. The top reasons for not discussing alternative therapies in the doctor’s office: the doctor didn’t ask (42 percent); patients realizing they should discuss alternative health strategies with the doctor (30 percent); not enough time to introduce the subject in the visit (19 percent); and patients assuming the doctors wouldn’t know about the visit (17 percent).

The therapies most often used by the survey respondents—a pretty solid summary of the topics regularly covered here at the Alternative Health Blog—included bodywork, such as massage therapy and chiropractic (45 percent), herbal products and dietary supplements (42 percent), mind-body practices (15 percent), naturopathy/acupuncture/homeopathy (14 percent) and energy work (10 percent).

There’s a kicker to this dropped link between alternative health users and mainstream doctors. Roughly 6 out of every 10 Americans 50 and older are currently using prescription drugs. That alone is a staggering number and motivation enough to persuade ourselves or loved ones to talk alternative health with doctors.

But there’s more. Once a doctor knows you are trying, say, acupuncture for pain relief, s/he can discover with you if it helps. The doctor can help adjust medications rather than the patient become a do-it-yourselfer with the prescription bottle. Plus, big plus, the doctor could well become more aware of healing therapies that others can use.

And that’s at the core of what we talk about here at the Alternative Health Blog. Alternative health therapies can heal our conditions or stave off aging or boost our quality of life without the side effects of drugs. Just to name a few. If we believe alternative therapies can heal—OK, we can all put our hands down now—then we need to talk about it, tell others who can benefit, learn the most we can about alternative health.

Even if it means talking to your doctor about it.

Bob Condor blogs for Alternative Health Journal every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.