According to the newest figures from the 2007 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), an annual study in which tens of thousands of Americans are interviewed about their health- and illness-related experiences, developed by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 38 percent of adults in the United States aged 18 years and over and nearly 12 percent of U.S. children aged 17 years and under use some form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).
That’s a lot of therapy outside the mainstream of “traditional” American medicine. According to the survey, most of the care was for pain. The higher the level of education and socioeconomic level, the more likely the use of CAM. As CAM is rarely covered by US insurance carriers, more wealthy people are more likely to be able to afford such care.