Complementary And Alternative Medicine Case Study

During past few decades, there has been an increasing number of people beginning to pay more attention to using Complementary and Alternative Medicines (CAMs) such as homeopathy, naturopathy, acupuncture, herbal medicines and Christian faith healing to cure diseases (Macartney and Wahlberg, 2014a, cited in Cant and Sharma, 1999; World Health Organization, 2002). But recently, controversy has centered on whether this is a valid method to treat serious illness instead of conventional medicine. Stoneman et al (2012) claim that complementary and alternative medicine is considered as a more natural and effective approach to treating illness. To combat this, Macartney and Wahlberg (2014b) argue that alternative remedies may not only trigger some

Firstly, comparing with conventional medicine, using alternative medicine to cure illness is more expensive for patient. Hollenberg (2006a) mentions that the most of CAM users are women who earn more money and obtain higher education. This indicates that people who have higher status of wealth may more easily access to a good health service. For example, according to a case study whose respondents are Canadian and British ovarian patients illustrates that over forty percent of patients claimed they used alternative approaches before. Of these, over sixty percent surveyed used more than one way (Sweet, 2013e). In addition, a simple treatment of allergy in German would cost approximately more than forty euros a time, and it is same in USA and UK. Therefore, it could be predicted that treat serious illness may cost more money through knowing the cost of allergy. What is more, medical care is incredibly crucial for any society. The public deserves to be healthy and have access to qualified doctors. For some poor people, they not only cannot afford such expensive therapy costs but also the result of treatment maybe has uncertain danger. Secondly, there is an increasing number of funds are invested in alternative medicine. According to a survey, Hollenberg (2006b) predicted that the consumption of alternative medical methods maybe more than 13.5 billion dollars in USA and more than 1.5 billion pounds in UK, which accounts for a large revenue for a country. This means that research complementary alternative medicine may waste numerous funds of country. Plenty of money should be invested on traditional medicine rather than alternative medicine in order to provide more opportunities for the poor patient to treat illness. For both of the elements, therefore, high costs of alternative medicine may lead to some serious patients cannot