| dc.description.abstract | Traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine (TCAM) refers to healthcare practices that are not a part of conventional health systems. Their use can be subsumed into four domains: Alternative medical systems (e.g., homeopathy), New age practices (e.g., art therapy), Natural product-based practices (e.g., herbal balms), and Rituals/Customs (e.g., prayers for health). These practices can be used in three distinct ways: for preventive purposes, together with official medical practices, or as an alternative to them, with the latter being the most problematic. Psychological roots of the tendency to resort to these practices is repeatedly proved to be an “irrational mindset” (IM), a composite of irrational beliefs and cognitive biases. Here we explored whether IM (Superstition, Magical health beliefs, Conspiracy mentality, and Naturalness bias) can differentiate between different types of TCAM use. To this end, for each of the four domains participants indicated the way they typically use it. We recruited 470 participants from Bosnia and Herzegovina (Mage = 44.9, SDage = 10.2; 65 % women). Using Linear discriminant analysis (LDA), we explored the relation between ways of TCAM use and IM. Since only Natural product-based medicine had frequency of alternative use > 4 %, we ran LDA to explore how IM predicts the way of use for this TCAM domain. Discriminant function indicated that IM has a role in predicting the way people use natural product-based medicine (Wilk’s Λ = .96, χ2 (12) = 21.06, R = .20, p = .050), with Superstition and Naturalness bias as the crucial predictors. The obtained function best
differentiates the individuals who used natural product-based medicine as an alternative to the conventional treatments from the others. Our results show that people who tend to abandon official medical practices for TCAM are those prone to superstition and searching for naturalness. The official health communication could be tailored to specifically target these beliefs. | sr |
