Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11338

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Publication type: news

Woodhead M.
Orthodox medicine eclipsed
6minutes (Australia) 2007 Aug 29
http://www.6minutes.com.au/dirplus/images/6minutes/newspluspharma/29_08_2007.pdf

Full text:

Alternative medicine is now a $4 billion a year business in Australia, with a new survey showing
it is now as widely used as conventional medicine.

Two out of three people were using some form of alternative or complementary medicine and almost half those surveyed had visited an alternative practitioner in the last year, a study by the WHO Collaborating Centre for Traditional Medicine, in Melbourne found.

The 2005 survey of 1067 randomly selected adults showed that usage of alternative medicine was now on a par with conventional medicine, with the estimated number of visits to alternative practitioners (69 million) equalling the number of visits to medical practitioners.

However, less than half the patients informed their doctor about use of alternative medicine.

Annual out of pocket expenses were estimated at $4.13 billion, said researchers in the study reported in the Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (13: 643-50)

“Complementary medicine use nationally in Australia appears to be considerably higher than estimated from previous Australian studies,” the study authors concluded.