Drowning or Thirsting: The Extremes of Availability of Medical Information

Background: To assess pediatricians' attitudes toward & practice of Complementary/Alternative Medicine (CAM) including their knowledge, experience, & referral patterns for CAM therapies. Methods: An anonymous, self-report, 27-item questionnaire was mailed nationally to fellows of the American Academy of Pediatrics in July 2004. 648 of 3500 pediatricians' surveyed responded (18%). Results: The median age ranged from 46–59 yrs; 52% female, 81% Caucasian, 71% generalists, & 85% trained in the US. Over 96% of pediatricians' responding believed their patients were using CAM. Discussions of CAM use were initiated by the family (70%) & only 37% of pediatricians asked about CAM use as part of routine medical history. Majority (84%) said more CME courses should be offered on CAM and 71% said they would consider referring patients to CAM practitioners. Medical conditions referred for CAM included; chronic problems (headaches, pain management, asthma, backaches) (86%), diseases with no known cure (55.5%) or failure of conventional therapies (56%), behavioral problems (49%), & psychiatric disorders (47%). American born, US medical school graduates, general pediatricians, & pediatricians who ask/talk about CAM were most likely to believe their patients used CAM (P < 0.01). Conclusion: Pediatricians' have a positive attitude towards CAM. Majority believe that their patients are using CAM, that asking about CAM should be part of routine medical history, would consider referring to a CAM practitioner and want more education on CAM. Background There is growing interest among patients, physicians, healthcare administrators, and third party payers in complementary/alternative medicine (CAM). CAM refers to a large range of therapies outside the domain of mainstream Western medicine that are used for the purpose of medical intervention, health promotion, or disease prevention. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) at the National Institutes of Health defines CAM as "a group of diverse medical and health care systems, practices, and products that are not presently considered to be part of conventional medicine."[1] Some examples of alternative therapies are: acupuncture/acupressure, botanical medicine, herbs, Published: 4 June 2007 BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2007, 7:18 doi:10.1186/1472-6882-7-18 Received: 9 January 2007 Accepted: 4 June 2007 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6882/7/18 © 2007 Sawni and Thomas; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.