The importance of wellness among users of complementary and alternative medicine: findings from the 2007 National Health Interview Survey.

Dawn M Upchurch,Bethany Wexler Rainisch

doi:10.1186/s12906-015-0886-y

Abstract

BackgroundThis study developed and tested a sociobehavioral wellness model of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to differentiate predisposing factors, enabling resources, need, and personal health practices according to use for wellness, for combined wellness and treatment, or for treatment alone.MethodsData were from the 2007 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), a cross-sectional, nationally representative sample of 23,393 adult Americans. This analysis included people who used at least one CAM modality in the past 12 months (n = 7003 adult users). Prevalence estimates and multinomial logistic regression results were weighted and adjusted for complex sample design.ResultsOverall, 86 % of CAM users reported reason for use as wellness (51 %) or wellness combined with treatment (35 %). White women had the lowest (48 %) and Asian men (66 %) had the highest wellness use. Compared to treatment only users, wellness users were significantly more likely to be older, more educated, in better health, and engaged in multiple healthy behaviors. There was support that those with health conditions were using methods for both treatment and to maintain health.ConclusionsThe findings underscore the central role of CAM in health self-management and wellness lifestyle. At a time of national health care reform highlighting the importance of health and wellness and employers turning to wellness programs to improve worker performance and well-being, these findings suggest a central role of CAM in those public health endeavors.

Highlights

This study developed and tested a sociobehavioral wellness model of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to differentiate predisposing factors, enabling resources, need, and personal health practices according to use for wellness, for combined wellness and treatment, or for treatment alone
Our sociobehavioral wellness model of CAM proposes that predisposing factors are exogenous, enabling resources are necessary but not sufficient conditions for use, that some need must be defined for use to occur, and that personal health practices are influenced by factors in each of the previous domains. We propose that these domains will inform and differentiate CAM users with respect to use for wellness, for wellness and treatment, or for treatment alone
Engaging in a greater number of healthy behaviors are more likely to use CAM for wellness or combined wellness and treatment. These findings demonstrate the potential usefulness of the sociobehavioral wellness model for CAM use and unequivocally point to the need to frame CAM use as health self-management and as part of a wellness lifestyle

Summary

Introduction

This study developed and tested a sociobehavioral wellness model of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to differentiate predisposing factors, enabling resources, need, and personal health practices according to use for wellness, for combined wellness and treatment, or for treatment alone. Some may use CAM for wellness and as part of a Upchurch and Rainisch BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine (2015) 15:362. Informed by earlier work [4, 12,13,14,15,16] we apply a sociobehavioral wellness model of CAM use to comprehensively evaluate the differences in reasons for use. We ask: Can the sociobehavioral wellness model be used to further differentiate predisposing factors, enabling resources, need, and personal health practices among CAM users with regard to their reason for use? We ask: Can the sociobehavioral wellness model be used to further differentiate predisposing factors, enabling resources, need, and personal health practices among CAM users with regard to their reason for use? We distinguish the characteristics of those who use CAM for wellness, for both wellness and treatment combined, or for treatment only

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Conclusion