How Complementary and Alternative Medicine Providers Frame Preventive Care

What is it about?

The use of complementary and alternative therapies has increased in recent years. While a great deal of research has examined how biomedicine approaches preventive care, there are gaps in current understandings of how alternative medicine providers describe preventive care in their practice. The findings from this research reveal how complementary and alternative medicine providers describe preventive care through relational, structural, and philosophical frames. Understanding CAM provider perceptions on preventive care can help illuminate communicative pathways in integrative medicine by supporting biomedical provider framing of CAM use in their patient communication and identifying elements of preventive medicine that support their patients’ individual health needs.

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Why is it important?

The study enhances diverse understandings of how preventive care is understood in practice and makes practical recommendations that can assist biomedical provider communication with their patients seeking CAM care alongside conventional treatments. Although preventive approaches have been successfully implemented in some areas of integrative medicine practice (e.g., in palliative and rehabilitative care), there is a need for furthering open communication between CAM and biomedical providers and shared decision making of CAM options between patients and their biomedical providers. When combined with conventional medicine, a preventive care ethos and an empowering patient relationship emphasized by CAM offers the potential for improved patient outcomes.