Introduction

A large and growing number of people in Western societies now use some form of alternative medicine for at least a portion of their health care. The use of alternative medicine is thought to be higher among young, affluent, educated groups, but a clear picture of who is using the many therapies available, and under what circumstances, has only recently begun to emerge. A newly published study in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society found that the choices are not limited to the young -- nearly one in three older Americans reported using some form of non-traditional medicine in the past year.

Survey results

Researchers from Harvard Medical School conducted a telephone survey of 2055 randomly selected adults in the United States, including 311 participants aged 65 or older. The survey respondents were asked about the number of visits they made to a medical doctor in the past year, as well as their lifetime use and use in the past 12 months of any of 20 alternative medical therapies. In this study, alternative medicine was defined as interventions that are not taught widely in medical schools and are not widely available in US hospitals.

The researchers found that 30% of those aged 65 or older used some form of alternative medicine in the past year. Applied to the US population as a whole, this represents about 10 million older adults. The leading treatments were chiropractic, used by 11% of the survey population, and herbal remedies, used by 8%. Mega-vitamin use was also among the top five treatments.

Doctors urge caution

Older adults need to be aware of some special concerns when using alternative medicine. First, the researchers point out that the safety of some treatments, including chiropractic, have not been well-established in older populations, even though they are considered to be safe in the population at large.

Because prescription drug use is much higher in older populations, older adults are also at an increased risk of adverse interactions between these drugs and herbal therapies or mega-vitamins. In this survey, 6% of older adults mixed prescription drugs with herbal therapies. And, while adverse interactions are a potential problem for people of any age, older adults are more likely to have medical conditions involving liver or kidney disease that increase the likelihood of harmful interactions.

Perhaps the largest red flag raised by this study is that more than half of the older adults using alternative medicine did not reveal this fact to their medical doctor. Given the possibility that alternative and conventional treatments may interact, this highlights the need for better communication between doctor and patient. Although patients may not always be comfortable doing so, they should be prepared to volunteer information about alternative health care use, even if their physicians do not ask.