Health
Doctors are more likely than before to prescribe alternative treatments to their patients and to resort to alternative medicine. For example, today it is more recommended to practice yoga, meditation and breathing practices to treat and prevent diseases, according to a new study.
The researchers found that about 3 percent of Americans began using psychophysical therapies on the advice of their doctors. Such therapies are already being used in clinics, says study author Dr. Aditi Nerurkar from Harvard Medical School. “We did not expect this treatment to be prescribed so often,” she added.
In 2007, about 38 percent of Americans used psychophysical therapies that include yoga and other practices and are alternative or alternative medicine methods. The US has been using such methods more often since 2002. Since then, the use of alternative medicine has increased by 75 per cent.
Until now, little was known about whether alternative treatment was used on the advice of doctors or whether such a decision was made independently.
Nerurcar and her colleagues collected information in more than 23,000 US cities in 2007. It turned out that 6.3 million Americans resort to psychophysical treatments on the advice of their doctors. At the same time, 34.8 million people who use these treatments do so on their own initiative. Those who were prescribed non-traditional methods of treatment by doctors had more serious illnesses and sought medical help more often than those who resorted to alternative medicine on their own.
“Research results have shown that doctors prescribe non-traditional methods of treatment in most cases when traditional ones no longer help,” Nerurcar said. “We were wondering maybe If patients started using such treatments sooner, would they recover faster and get less sick later on?”