Alternative medicine fans more likely to get shots

Adults who use alternative or complementary medicines are more likely to receive recommended vaccinations than their peers who don’t use these products, according to a study by researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Among 30,617 adults participating in the 2002 National Health Interview Survey, the 36 percent who said they had used complementary or alternative medicines (CAM) recently were more likely to have received shots for preventing the flu, pneumococcal infections and hepatitis B.

Nevertheless, most people the CDC considers “priority” recipients for the flu and pneumococcal vaccines because of a high-risk condition didn’t get them, Dr. Shannon Stokley of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases in Atlanta and her colleagues found.

Among these priority adults, 44 percent of CAM users had a flu shot, compared with 38 percent of people who were not CAM users. Forty percent of priority adults who had used alternative medicine recently received a pneumococcal vaccine compared with 33 percent of non-users. All of these differences were statistically significant.

Sixty percent of priority adults who were also alternative medicine users had received their hepatitis B vaccine compared with 56 percent of non-users, which wasn’t a statistically significant difference.

Immunization rates for non-priority study participants were also higher among CAM than non-CAM users for all three vaccines.

Because parents who are alternative medicine adherents may be more likely to reject immunization for their children, Stokley noted in an interview, she and her colleagues expected that adult CAM users would have a similar reluctance to get vaccinated. But the opposite was true.

Perhaps, she explained, these adults tend to use CAM as a complement to their regular medical care rather than a replacement for it. “We did notice that people who had used CAM in the past 12 months did make more doctor visits to their other physicians,” Stokley said. “They may be more engaged with the health care system and they may be more proactive about preventing illness.”

The findings suggest that it might be possible to increase vaccine coverage among adults by working with CAM practitioners, the investigators conclude.

SOURCE: BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, online February 22, 2008.

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