A very important survey of usage of homeopathic medicines in the USA

Dana Ullman, MPH, CCH

A very important survey of usage of homeopathic medicines in the USA was just published, and here are some of the salient facts about this survey:

• It was published in the most respected public health journal in the USA, “The American Journal of Public Health.”
• The authors of this survey were from Harvard’s School of Public Health and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard Medical School affiliated hospital.
• This survey noted that homeopathic studies “suggest potential public health benefits such as reductions in unnecessary antibiotic usage, reductions in costs to treat certain respiratory diseases, improvements in peri-menopausal depression, improved health outcomes in chronically ill individuals. And control of a Leptospirosis epidemic in Cuba.”
• This survey analyzed data from the 2012 National Health Interview Survey for the prevalence and patterns of usage of homeopathic medicines among U.S. adults in relation to other complementary and integrative medicine (CIM) use.
• Two-thirds of homeopathy users ranked homeopathy as one of their top three CIM therapies.
• Homeopathy users who saw a professional homeopath were significantly more likely to feel that homeopathy was “very important in maintaining health and well-being” and that it helped their health condition “a great deal” than were homeopathy users who did not see a professional homeopath.
• Previous governmental surveys in 2002 and 2007 found that homeopathy was used by 1.7% and 1.8% of American adults respectively. This new survey found that in 2012 the usage of homeopathy had grew approximately 15% to 2.1% of U.S. adults.
• The usage of homeopathic medicines in the U.S. are considerably lower than in other Western countries, such as Italy (8.2%) and Germany (14.8%)
• This survey, like dozens before it, have found that people who were more educated were more likely to use homeopathic medicines than people who were less educated.
• The most common conditions for which people sought homeopathic treatment were respiratory and ear-nose-and-throat complaints as well as musculoskeletal pain syndromes.
• The researchers concluded, “Because of potential public health benefits associated with the use of homeopathy, further research on this modality and targeted studies of users are warranted.”

The abstract is available at:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26890179