Welcome to the website for our project exploring risk-taking behaviours with alternative healthcare.
The alternative healthcare sector has grown significantly over the past two decades, prompting research into the possible motivators and factors associated with its uptake. The use of alternative healthcare may be positive or benign, but there is increasing evidence that people are engaging in some more hazardous alternative healthcare activities, such as ignoring medical advice in preference to alternative healthcare for medically treatable conditions, or utilizing unsafe or experimental therapeutics (e.g., infant chiropractic procedures, drinking Wolfsbane tea, or undertaking intravenous vitamin therapy outside of safe clinical sites).
Work exploring the psychology of illness and decision making behaviours substantiates theories that there are specific personality traits that may help explain engagement with risk-associated alternative healthcare behaviours, including those factors that drive people away from conventional medicine. This project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, seeks to build knowledge and theory in this emerging field, which would subsequently help better shape policy in this area.
Our research focuses on two questions:
- What types of risk-associated alternative healthcare behaviours are evident in the Canadian public?
- Can existing health behavioural theory and psychometric tools that are associated with alternative healthcare behaviours (health control beliefs, reward responsiveness, attitudes to science, satisfaction with orthodox medicine and susceptibility to persuasion) help predict the likelihood of engagement with risk-associated alternative healthcare behaviours?
Alternative Healthcare
We define alternative healthcare broadly as:
“The range of therapeutics that largely originate from traditions and theories distinct from contemporary biomedical science, and which claim mechanisms of action outside of those currently accepted by scientific and biomedical consensus.”