Consumers Drive Hospitals’ Use of CAM

Consumer-driven health care is making American hospitals more comforting places to heal. Many hospitals are also looking at adding complementary therapies.

An article published recently in the Journal of Science and Healing noted that, “After surviving a variety of threats to their financial viability over the last decade, hospitals now face the challenge of responding to an increasingly consumer-driven healthcare environment…in many respects their greatest challenge has been creating access for their patients to less traditional, complementary therapies.”

The article cited a 2005 survey by the American Hospital Association that revealed more than one-quarter of hospitals offer one or more complementary therapies. This was almost an 8-percent increase since 1998. Though most of those therapies were given to outpatients, those given in-house included massage therapy, relaxation training, acupuncture, guided imagery, healing touch and music or art therapy. The inclusion of these therapies, according to the survey, was the result of patient demand, research and availability of practitioners.

Complementary techniques are generally acknowledged by health-care professionals as being helpful to patients. Not all complementary therapies, however, are equally accepted. Therefore, some hospital programs run under the radar of medical staff, who sometimes have difficulty with the scientific merit of complementary practices.

Resistance, in many cases, is overcome by education and training programs in complementary therapies offered to all staff, including physicians, the article noted. Personal experience with the therapy and seeing positive results in patients are often very convincing.

—Janie Franz