Patients whose GP knows complementary medicine tend to have lower costs and live longer

Abstract

BackgroundHealth economists have largely ignored complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as an area of research, although both clinical experiences and several empirical studies suggest cost-effectiveness of CAM.ObjectiveTo explore the cost-effectiveness of CAM compared with conventional medicine.MethodsA dataset from a Dutch health insurer was used containing quarterly information on healthcare costs (care by general practitioner (GP), hospital care, pharmaceutical care, and paramedic care), dates of birth and death, gender and 6-digit postcode of all approximately 150,000 insurees, for the years 2006–2009. Data from 1913 conventional GPs were compared with data from 79 GPs with additional CAM training in acupuncture (25), homeopathy (28), and anthroposophic medicine (26).ResultsPatients whose GP has additional CAM training have 0–30% lower healthcare costs and mortality rates, depending on age groups and type of CAM. The lower costs result from fewer hospital stays and fewer prescription drugs.DiscussionSince the differences are obtained while controlling for confounders including neighborhood specific fixed effects at a highly detailed level, the lower costs and longer lives are unlikely to be related to differences in socioeconomic status. Possible explanations include selection (e.g. people with a low taste for medical interventions might be more likely to choose CAM) and better practices (e.g. less overtreatment, more focus on preventive and curative health promotion) by GPs with knowledge of complementary medicine. More controlled studies (replication studies, research based on more comprehensive data, cost-effectiveness studies on CAM for specific diagnostic categories) are indicated.

Passive Hydrotherapy WATSU® for Rehabilitation of an Accident Survivor: A Prospective Case Report

“…While the term ‘complementary therapy' leaves a notion of ‘additional costs', analyses of registries indicate that integrating such approaches in the management of long-term pain can introduce a continued reduction in drug prescription/consumption, in contrast to observed increases under conventional medicine alone [32]. This stands in line with registry analyses concluding that doctors who are additionally trained in CAM produce similar health outcomes at lower costs [33,34]. Accordingly, the World Health Organization prompts governments to support and facilitate research and to implement complementary and traditional medicine into conventional medical routines [35,36].…”

Mind–body practices: An alternative, drug-free treatment for smoking cessation? A systematic review of the literature

“…However, there are limited cost-effectiveness studies on CAM approaches mainly due to methodological difficulties associated with outcomes that can be challenging to assess using standard medically-oriented measures (Hollinghurst et al, 2008; Mason et al, 2002). The interest, growing availability, and increased usage of CAM (Barnes et al, 2008; Furlan et al, 2012; Kooreman and Baars, 2012), together with the potential for lower implementation cost, underscore the need for clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy of mind-body interventions for smoking cessation.…”

Ethical Implications of the Increasing Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine

“…In another study from Switzerland, the same authors report an equal or better cost effectiveness of CAM in the setting of Swiss ambulatory care by comparing cost of physicians applying CAM with those applying COM only [49]. A study from The Netherlands comes to a similar result: CAM can be cost-effective if applied by a physician [50]. In future, more health-economic studies will have to be conducted in order to demonstrate the potential health-economic benefits of CAM methods [51,52,53,54].…”