ABSTRACT

Our purpose was to compare the sosciodemographical differences between Complementary and Alternative medicine (CAM) users and non users with skin diseases and to investigate the positive and negative impacts of CAM among patients.

The patients with dermatological conditions attending the dermatology outpatient clinic were enrolled to the study randomly. The sociodemographical properties, diagnosis of the skin diseases, duration of the disease, CAM usage and duration of usage and the positive and negative impacts of the treatments were recorded.

A total of 522 (302 female, 220 male, median age 34.8±16.7) patients were enrolled in the study. Eighty-eight patients (16.8%) were found to have used a CAM method. The mean age of CAM users (28.2±14.3) were statistically lower than non users (36.0±16.9) (p=0.000 <0.05). The disease duration of CAM users (4.3±5.5 year) was statistically longer than non-users (2.8±5.2 year). The CAM methods were mostly preferred in acne vulgaris disease (31.8%), and the mostly used CAM method was herbal therapies (59.1%). We found that 16 (18.2%) out of 88 CAM users had side effects from CAM treatment while nine patients (10.3%) improved.

Complementary and alternative medicine usage is not frequent among skin diseases. The patients with longer disease duration are more prone to use CAM. The side effects rarely occur due to CAM use and we ascertain that very rarely do patients benefit from CAM methods.