The New York Times on Friday examined how the more than $27 billion that U.S. residents spend annually on alternative and complementary medicine provides the "most telling evidence of Americans' dissatisfaction with traditional health care." According to the Times, an estimated 48% of U.S. adults used at least one alternative or complementary treatment in 2004, compared with 42% in 1994, and health care experts maintain that the rate continues to increase "for reasons that have as much to do with increasing distrust of mainstream medicine and the psychological appeal of nontraditional approaches as with the therapeutic properties of herbs or other supplements." U.S. residents "do not appear to care that there is little, if any, evidence that many of the therapies work"; that "alternative therapy practitioners do not have a fraction of the training mainstream doctors do"; or that vitamin and dietary supplement manufacturers "are as profit-driven" as pharmaceutical manufacturers, the Times reports. U.S. residents who use alternative or complementary treatments often have a "sense of disappointment" or "betrayal" related to a "misdiagnosis, an intolerable drug, failed surgery, a dismissive doctor" or "haggles with insurance providers, conflicting findings from medical studies and news reports of drug makers' covering up product side effects," according to the Times. "Whatever the benefits and risks of its many concoctions and methods, alternative medicine offers them at least the promise of affectionate care, unhurried service, freedom from prescription drug side effects and the potential for feeling not just better but also spiritually charged," the Times reports (Carey, New York Times, 2/3).

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