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Use of Alternative Medicine in Psychiatric and Medical Outpatients

Objectives：Psychiatric patients are known to use alternative medicine more frequently than medical patients. However, the factors increasing the frequency of use are not clearly understood. In an attempt to find predictive factors for the use of alternative medicine, we conducted a questionnaire survey on outpatients in psychiatric and endocrinology units of a university hospital. Methods：A total of ‘first come, first served’ consecutive sample of 95 psychiatric outpatients and 100 medical outpatients as a control group were surveyed. The questionnaire contained sociodemographic information, use of alternative medicine, clinical information, and depressiv symptoms. Results：As a result, 62.1% of psychiatric and 23.0% of medical patients reported to have used at least one type of alternative medicine during the past 12 months. Logistic regression analysis revealed predictive factors for alternative medicine user as being psychiatric patients (odds ratio=4.09, 95% confidence interval 2.11-7.95, p<0.001) and those who didn’t finish high school (OR=30.23, 95% CI 3.68-248.18, p=0.002). Conclusion：The finding of low education as a predictive factor is contrary to Western findings, which suggested higher education as a predictive factor for use of alternative medicine. This finding needs to be replicated and investigated for culturally different illness concept and behavior. These finding suggest that asking the patient’s use of alternative medicine should be a part of routine psychiatric history taking