Orientations toward integration: Comparing biomedical and complementary and alternative medicine providers

Over the past 10 years, US studies have found steady 40% prevalence rates of 12 month past use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) for the adult population. This amounts to out-of-pocket costs for patients in the area of $27 billion annually. Physicians have patients who would benefit from CAM modalities and CAM providers have patients needing access to conventional diagnosis and treatment. Dangers of not integrating care include delaying or depriving patients of safe and effective management, the potential for harmful interactions or delayed or incorrect diagnoses. The 2005 IOM report on CAM suggested that it was important to understand how CAM and conventional medical treatments and providers interact with each other and to study models of how the two approaches can be provided in coordinated ways. In this health policy study, a literature review on the attitudes towards integrating conventional and unconventional medicine from the perspective of biomedical providers will be compared with a primary qualitative dataset of 40 CAM practitioners. A model of integration sums up these findings. The research questions addressed in this study are: 1) How do CAM providers feel about integrating biomedical and CAM modalities? 2) What are their ideas for models of care? 3) Do they share the same themes of concern as their conventional counterparts? 4) To what extent are CAM providers integrated? This topic has broad public health implications in terms of the safety and effectiveness of prescription/referral of treatments by both types of providers.