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Alternative medicine in Danish hospitals
Almost a third of the hospitals in Denmark apply acupuncture.
Every eighth hospital is engaged in an ongoing research project on alternative medicine.
Alternative medicine is more commonly used in large hospitals than in small hospitals and it is used for a comprehensive range of services, e.g. cancer and birth services.
31 % of the Danish hospitals apply alternative medicine. The use of alternative medicine is
more commonly used in somatic hospitals (33 %) than in psychiatric hospitals (23 %).
more commonly used in public hospitals (34 %) than in private hospitals (21 %).
more commonly used in large hospitals with 100 or more beds (39 %) than in small hospitals with less than 100 beds (22 %).
The most commonly used type of alternative treatment is acupuncture (97%).
The treatments are provided by a person within the conventional health care system, e.g. a physiotherapist, a midwife, a medical practitioner or a nurse.
The study is based on a questionnaire sent to the medical directors at all public and private hospitals in Denmark. 126 medical directors answered the questionnaire, which is equivalent to a 97 % response rate.
In 32 of the 39 hospitals that apply alternative medicine in Denmark, contact persons for the alternative treatments offered at the hospitals were interviewed or asked to fill out a more elaborate questionnaire.
The study is a co-operation between researchers from the Interdisciplinary CAM-research unit (KUFAB) at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and researchers from the National Research Center in Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NAFKAM), Norway.
