Arkansas physician perceptions of complementary and alternative medicine

Research has shown that Americans are utilizing Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) on an ever-increasing, regular basis without sharing this information with their physicians. The purpose of this study was to investigate and determine how CAM fits into the mainstream, biomedical treatment plan by surveying 540 family and general practitioners currently licensed in the state of Arkansas. Studies have shown that family and general practitioners have more contact with larger and diverse groups of patients and tend to be more open minded about CAM than specialists. For these reasons, this research focused only on the perceptions of this subset of physicians. To gather this information, a 21-question Likert survey was distributed to all 540 family and general practitioners who were members of the Arkansas Medical Society. Of these 540 participants, 67 surveys were returned, resulting in a 12.4% return rate. Roughly one third to one half of respondents reported a high perception of CAM. However, when recommending, it is more important that CAM complemented rather than took the place of allopathic treatments. This could be due to physician lack of knowledge about CAM and, hence, their hesitancy to condone its use in lieu of interventions already proven effective. Nearly all respondents stated that "more prevention" would contribute to an optimal healthcare system. Almost three fourths of the responding physicians believe CAM and biomedicine can work together, possibly recognizing the several CAM modalities focused on prevention. The lack of clear randomized control trials was seen as the greatest barrier to integration by 86.6% of participants. Based on the cumulative information provided by the participants to safely and effectively integrate CAM into the biomedical healthcare system, Arkansas physicians need to (a) begin asking patients on a regular basis about their CAM usage, (b) stay abreast of current CAM research, and (c) relay these findings to their patients in an open and nonjudgmental environment. It must be kept in mind that the results likely apply only to Caucasian family practitioners in Arkansas, because 62 of the 67 participants were Caucasian, and 63 indicated they were family practitioners.