Men with prostate cancer: making decisions about complementary/alternative medicine.
OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to explore prostate cancer patients 'perceptions, feelings, ideas, and experiences regarding making decisions to use (or not use) complementary/alternative medicine (CAM).


METHODS
Five focus groups were conducted with 29 men diagnosed with prostate cancer. Content analysis of the verbatim transcripts was used to identify key themes in the data.


RESULTS
Decision making about CAM treatments appears to depend on both fixed (e.g., disease characteristics, demographic characteristics, and medical history) and flexible (e.g., perceptions of CAM and conventional medicine, experiences with the health care system and health care practitioners, and perceptions about the need for control or action) decision factors.


CONCLUSIONS
The participants in this study appeared more likely to be "pushed" toward using CAM by negative experiences with the health care system than to be "pulled" toward CAM by perceptions about its safety or congruence with their beliefs about health and illness.
Boon
Heather
H
Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. heather.boon@utoronto.ca
Brown
Judith Belle
JB
Gavin
Alan
A
Westlake
Kathleen
K
D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002755:Choice Behavior; D000529:Complementary Therapies / Q000523:psychology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D017144:Focus Groups; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009367:Neoplasm Staging; D009864:Ontario; D010342:Patient Acceptance of Health Care / Q000523:psychology*; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D011471:Prostatic Neoplasms / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy*; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors