Drivers of CM use
Over half of the selected articles identified various ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors as drivers behind CM use. Patient interactions and experiences with the conventional health system appear influential with unsatisfactory results from conventional therapy [38, 47, 49–52], and the desire to further reduce symptoms or side effects from conventional therapy [27, 38, 41, 50, 51, 53, 54] both being reported as popular drivers of CM use. Patients were also drawn positively to CM for a number of other reasons including: attraction to the perceived notion of CM as a holistic method of health care [55, 56]; the ability to use CM as a preventive therapy [27, 50, 53, 57, 58]; and the therapeutic value of CM as an adjunctive therapy to conventional medicine [50, 53]. Other drivers amongst patients using CM centred on the perceived alignment of CM with the individual’s personal belief system [59], the perception of CM as safe [60], the ability for CM to provide hope [61] or a sense of patient control over their treatment [50, 62, 63], and a perception that CM practitioners are more supportive towards their health compared to other health professionals [27, 64]. Within subpopulations with chronic health conditions, CM use was linked to reducing side effects from conventional medicine, dissatisfaction with standard care and to assist in disease management [28, 39, 41, 46, 53, 56, 61, 65, 66].