them,” said study co-author Richard Nahin.
He is lead epidemiologist at the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.
Expenditures in 2012 included:
– $14.7 billion out-of-pocket on visits to complementary practitioners such as chiropractors, yoga instructors, acupuncturists or massage therapists — nearly 30 percent of what people spent on traditional medical services.
– $12.8 billion on natural product supplements, which was about one-quarter of what people spent on prescription drugs.
– $2.7 billion on books, CDs, videos and other self-help materials related to complementary health.
Overall, spending on complementary medicine amounted to just over 9 percent of out-of-pocket health care expenditures and about 1 percent of all money spent on health care in the United States, the researchers found.
Most of this alternative health care is being used by adults, not children, the report found. The researchers said about $28 billion was spent on adults, compared with just $1.9 billion for children.
Even people with lower incomes spend quite a bit on complementary medicine, according to the report published June 22 in the National Health Statistics Reports.
Nahin and his colleagues found that families making less than