Live Life Team
In 1998, a study was published which suggests that most alternative medicines were used in connection with standard treatment in medicine. Results of the research revealed that those using alternative medicine tend to report poor health status and have a high educational level. Conventional medicine’s dissatisfaction was not a factor that was significant in the choice but rather, most of the users of alternative medicine seem to do it because they realised that such alternatives in health care were more congruent with their beliefs, philosophical orientations, and their own values in life and health. Specifically, subjects described an experience that was transformational and changed the user’s worldview, a holistic health orientation, identification with groups that are committed to feminism, personality, environmentalism, psychology, and spirituality, or that the users suffered from various ailments that are minor and common such as chronic pain, anxiety, and back problems.
The psychological and socio-cultural reasons for alternative medicine’s appeal to the minorities who used them instead of conventional medicines are speculated upon. Various socio-cultural reasons for the interest in alternative medicine centre on the lower level of literacy in scientific knowledge, an increase in attitudes that are antiscientific, and mysticism of the new age. However, there is an increase in conspiracy theories of pharmaceutical companies and conventional medicine, mistrust in traditional figures of authority such as doctors, and dislike of scientific medicine’s current methods of delivery. The above mentioned factors have led patients to look to alternative medicine in treating various common ailments.
