IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v55y2002i6p1025-1037.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An investigation of the health beliefs and motivations of complementary medicine clients

Author

Listed:
  • Sirois, Fuschia M.
  • Gick, Mary L.

Abstract

The current study was concerned with factors associated with the use of complementary medicine (CM). The reasons for CM use were examined by dividing complementary medicine clients into two groups based on the frequency and length of their use of complementary therapies, and comparing them with conventional medicine clients as well as to each other. New/infrequent CM clients (n=70), established CM clients (n=71), and orthodox medicine clients (n=58) were distinguished on the basis of health beliefs, socio-demographic, medical, and personality variables. Different patterns of predictors of CM use emerged depending on which client groups were compared. In general, health-aware behaviors and dissatisfaction with conventional medicine were the best predictors of overall and initial/infrequent CM use, and more frequent health-aware behaviors were associated with continued CM use. Medical need also influenced the choice to use CM, and was the best predictor of committed CM use, with the established CM clients reporting more health problems than the new/infrequent CM group. Overall, income was a significant discriminator, but did not predict initial or continued CM use. Openness to new experience was associated with CM use in general, but was most notable in the decision to initially try or explore using CM. The findings support the utility of the three components (predisposing, enabling, and need factors) of the socio-behavioral model for explaining why some people choose CM. Overall, the results of the current study suggest that CM clients need to be looked at in more sophisticated ways, rather than being treated simply as a homogenous group with similar beliefs, motivations and needs

Suggested Citation

  • Sirois, Fuschia M. & Gick, Mary L., 2002. "An investigation of the health beliefs and motivations of complementary medicine clients," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 55(6), pages 1025-1037, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:55:y:2002:i:6:p:1025-1037
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(01)00229-5
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dhar Chowdhuri, Praheli & Meyur, Suman, 2018. "Exploration of Personality Factors and their Effects on People’s Decision Making of Complementary and Alternative Medicine," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 5(2(4)), pages 120-125.
    2. Opher Caspi & Mary Koithan & Michael W. Criddle, 2004. "Alternative Medicine or “Alternative†Patients: A Qualitative Study of Patient-Oriented Decision-Making Processes with Respect to Complementary and Alternative Medicine," Medical Decision Making, , vol. 24(1), pages 64-79, January.
    3. Shippee, Tetyana Pylypiv & Schafer, Markus H. & Ferraro, Kenneth F., 2012. "Beyond the barriers: Racial discrimination and use of complementary and alternative medicine among Black Americans," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 74(8), pages 1155-1162.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:55:y:2002:i:6:p:1025-1037. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.