National Health Interview Survey 2007 – CAM Use by Adults

If you want to understand how Americans were using complementary and alternative medicine in the late 2000s, the 2007 National Health Interview Survey is the big, unglamorous, data-packed gold mine. It did not arrive with incense, whale sounds, or a yoga mat. It arrived with interviews, methodology, weighted estimates, and the kind of national scope that makes researchers sit up straighter in their chairs.

The short version is this: in 2007, complementary and alternative medicine, often shortened to CAM, was not a fringe hobby practiced by a handful of crystal enthusiasts and one neighbor with a suspicious number of herbal teas. It was part of mainstream American behavior. Adults across the United States reported using a wide range of approaches, from natural products and massage to meditation, chiropractic care, and yoga. The survey showed that CAM had become woven into how many people thought about pain, stress, prevention, self-care, and the gaps they felt in conventional care.

That is exactly why the 2007 NHIS still matters. It captured not just what adults used, but how they used it, who used it most, and what that usage said about the culture of health in America at the time. It also revealed a pattern that still feels familiar today: many adults were not necessarily rejecting conventional medicine. They were trying to supplement it, personalize it, or make it feel more human.

What the 2007 NHIS Actually Measured

The 2007 National Health Interview Survey gathered data from a large, nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. Its complementary health section asked about dozens of therapies, including provider-based services such as acupuncture and chiropractic care, as well as self-directed practices like meditation, breathing exercises, and dietary supplements. That broad design matters because CAM is not one thing. It is a big umbrella, and under that umbrella were products, practices, systems, and routines that varied from highly hands-on to entirely self-managed.

This is one reason the survey became so influential. It moved the conversation away from vague claims like “a lot of people try alternative medicine” and toward a more useful question: Which approaches are adults actually using, and for what reasons?

In the 2007 findings, nearly 4 in 10 adults reported using some type of CAM in the previous 12 months. That made CAM use substantial, visible, and impossible to dismiss as a statistical side quest. It also revealed something important about American health behavior: people were not waiting for a single medical system to solve every problem. Many were building their own layered approach to feeling better.

The Most Popular CAM Therapies Among Adults

The survey found that adults most commonly used nonvitamin, nonmineral natural products. In plain English, that means herbs, oils, and other supplement-style products that sat outside standard vitamin and mineral use. After that came deep breathing exercises, meditation, chiropractic or osteopathic manipulation, massage, and yoga.

That ranking is interesting because it mixes two very different kinds of health behavior. On one side, there were products people could buy, store in a cabinet, and take at home. On the other, there were practices people could perform, learn, or receive from a practitioner. The result was a CAM landscape that was both consumer-driven and experience-driven.

Natural Products Ruled the Category

Natural products were the most commonly used CAM approach among adults, which says a lot about convenience and perception. Buying a supplement is easier than scheduling recurring sessions with a practitioner. It also often feels more approachable to people who want to “do something” for their health without fully changing providers or routines.

The survey’s product details showed the popularity of items like fish oil or omega-3 products, glucosamine, echinacea, flaxseed oil, and ginseng. That list is almost a time capsule of American wellness shopping in the 2000s. Walk through any pharmacy aisle back then and you would have seen half the survey represented on a shelf.

Mind-Body Practices Were Not Niche

Deep breathing exercises and meditation ranked near the top, which tells us adults were not using CAM only for physical aches and pains. They were also turning toward practices tied to calm, focus, stress relief, and the desire to feel more in control of daily life. Yoga also continued its climb, reflecting a period when it was becoming less of a mysterious studio activity and more of a recognizable part of American fitness and wellness culture.

That rise matters because it suggests CAM was expanding beyond treatment and into lifestyle. It was becoming part of prevention, maintenance, and coping, not just reaction.

Who Was Most Likely to Use CAM?

The 2007 NHIS showed clear patterns in adult CAM use. It was more common among women, adults ages 30 to 69, adults with higher education, adults who were not poor, adults living in the West, former smokers, and adults who had been hospitalized in the past year. In other words, CAM use was not random. It followed social, economic, and health-related patterns.

Women reported higher use than men, a finding that matched other health behavior research from the period. That may reflect differences in care-seeking behavior, openness to self-care routines, chronic symptom management, or willingness to experiment with multiple pathways to relief. The survey also showed notable variation by race and ethnicity, with higher reported use among American Indian or Alaska Native adults and white adults than among Black adults in that dataset.

Education also played a major role. Adults with more education were more likely to use CAM, which may reflect greater exposure to health information, greater ability to pay out of pocket, or stronger interest in wellness-oriented habits. Of course, it may also reflect one timeless American tradition: the more options people believe they have, the more likely they are to explore all of them.

Why Adults Used CAM in 2007

The simplest answer is that adults used CAM for both treatment and wellness. Later analyses of the 2007 NHIS helped sharpen that picture. A large majority of CAM users reported using these approaches either for general wellness, or for wellness combined with treatment. That means many people were not choosing CAM because conventional care had completely failed them. They were also using it to maintain health, improve energy, manage stress, and support overall well-being.

This is a major point, and it changes the tone of the conversation. CAM use in 2007 was not only about opposition to conventional medicine. It often reflected a broader, more preventive health mindset. Adults were trying to feel better before things got worse, cope with ongoing issues, and create some sense of ownership over their bodies and routines.

That said, cost and dissatisfaction with conventional care still mattered. The NHIS showed adults were more likely to use CAM when worries about the cost of conventional medical care delayed treatment or made care harder to afford. That finding is not exactly shocking. When health care feels expensive, hard to access, rushed, or incomplete, people go looking for additional tools. Sometimes they look for relief. Sometimes they look for hope. Sometimes they look for both in the same bottle, class, or treatment table.

The Conditions Most Often Linked to CAM Use

One of the most useful findings in the 2007 survey was that adults most often used CAM for musculoskeletal problems. Back pain or back problems topped the list, followed by neck pain, joint pain or stiffness, arthritis, and related conditions. That pattern makes practical sense. Pain conditions are stubborn, often chronic, and deeply disruptive to ordinary life. They also tend to push people toward therapies that promise relief without making them feel like a chemistry experiment.

Back pain, in particular, stood out. This suggests that many adults viewed CAM as a hands-on or self-directed strategy for symptom management. Massage, chiropractic manipulation, yoga, breathing exercises, and meditation all fit neatly into a pain-and-stress story. They can also be experienced as more active and personal than simply being told to rest, wait, stretch, or take another pill.

The survey also showed a striking drop in CAM use for head or chest colds compared with 2002. That decline is a reminder that CAM patterns are shaped by trends, marketing, public beliefs, and shifting behavior, not just by medical need. Americans will enthusiastically adopt wellness habits, but they also change course quickly when the cultural mood changes. Health behavior is science mixed with habit, hope, and whatever was heavily discussed at the time.

What the Spending Data Revealed

The 2007 NHIS did not just show that adults used CAM. It showed they were willing to pay for it. Follow-up estimates based on the same survey found that adults spent tens of billions of dollars out of pocket on CAM products, classes, materials, and practitioner visits. Total annual spending reached roughly $33.9 billion, with nearly two-thirds tied to self-care approaches rather than practitioner-based care.

That spending pattern is one of the most revealing parts of the story. CAM in 2007 was not just a provider relationship. It was a retail and self-management economy. Adults bought products, attended classes, and built personal wellness routines at home. Natural products alone accounted for a large share of those out-of-pocket dollars, while millions of adults also made hundreds of millions of visits to CAM practitioners.

From a public health perspective, this matters because spending reveals commitment. People may tell survey interviewers they tried something once, but spending billions of dollars is a different level of engagement. It means CAM was not merely symbolic. It had become a real part of household decision-making.

Why the 2007 Survey Still Matters Today

The 2007 NHIS remains important because it captured a transition moment in American health culture. CAM was no longer operating at the edges of public awareness. It had become a mainstream behavior among adults, especially in areas tied to pain relief, self-care, and wellness. The survey also helped researchers see that use varied by sex, age, education, region, and health status, which made it harder to talk about CAM as though all users were the same.

It also taught an important lesson about definitions. Later CDC trend reports used a narrower “complementary health approaches” framework and generated a slightly lower estimate for adult use in 2007 than the original 38.3 percent figure. That does not mean the original survey was wrong. It means categories matter. If researchers count different approaches in different ways, prevalence estimates shift. Statistics, like smoothies, depend heavily on what you throw in.

Most of all, the 2007 findings still matter because they reflect a pattern that remains recognizable: adults want care that helps them manage pain, reduce stress, improve quality of life, and feel heard. They want evidence, but they also want agency. They want treatment, but they also want wellness. The 2007 NHIS captured that blend with unusual clarity.

Experiences Behind the Numbers: What CAM Use Likely Looked Like in Real Life

Surveys are excellent at measuring behavior, but they are terrible at describing what it feels like to live inside those numbers. The 2007 NHIS did not collect diary entries from adults explaining why they bought fish oil, booked a massage, or learned breathing exercises after a rough week. Still, the patterns are vivid enough that we can understand the kinds of real-life experiences those adults were probably having.

Imagine an office worker in her forties with recurring lower back pain. She sees a doctor, gets advice, maybe a prescription, maybe a recommendation to exercise more, and then goes back to a desk that seems personally committed to ruining her spine. A weekly massage starts to feel less like a luxury and more like a peace treaty with her muscles. She tries yoga because a friend swears by it. She adds fish oil because it sounds sensible, or at least more constructive than arguing with her chair.

Now picture a man in his fifties who is not trying to rebel against conventional medicine at all. He takes his prescribed medications, keeps his appointments, and still turns to deep breathing exercises or meditation because stress is chewing through his sleep. He is not rejecting science. He is looking for an extra handle on daily life. That is the part the 2007 data captured so well: CAM was often an “and,” not an “instead.”

There was probably also the adult who felt priced out, rushed through appointments, or discouraged by treatments that did not seem to solve the whole problem. For that person, CAM may have offered time, touch, ritual, explanation, or simply the comforting sense that someone was finally paying attention. Even when evidence varied across therapies, the experience of being proactive had its own appeal.

Then there were wellness users, the adults who were not necessarily treating a major disease but wanted to feel more balanced, more energetic, less tense, and maybe a little more in charge of their health. They might have kept supplements in the kitchen, practiced meditation before bed, tried yoga on weekends, and described the whole routine as “just trying to stay healthy.” That phrase sounds casual, but in public health terms it signals a major shift: people were building personal health systems outside the exam room.

These experiences are why the 2007 NHIS still resonates. The numbers are statistical, but the behavior is deeply human. Adults were dealing with pain, stress, uncertainty, costs, and the everyday desire to function better. CAM became part of that story because it promised relief, participation, and sometimes hope. Not magic, not perfection, and definitely not a universal answer. But for many adults in 2007, it felt like one more useful tool in the health toolbox. And if that toolbox happened to include a chiropractor visit, a bottle of omega-3s, and ten minutes of deep breathing before work, well, that was America in the data.

Conclusion

The 2007 National Health Interview Survey showed that CAM use by adults was widespread, varied, and shaped by far more than curiosity. It reflected pain management, self-care habits, wellness goals, cost pressures, and a broader cultural desire for more personal control over health. The most common approaches ranged from natural products to meditation, massage, chiropractic care, and yoga, while musculoskeletal pain remained one of the biggest reasons adults turned to these options.

For researchers, clinicians, publishers, and health readers, the real value of the 2007 NHIS is that it moved the conversation from stereotype to evidence. It showed who used CAM, what they used, and why it mattered. Even years later, that snapshot still helps explain how Americans think about health: not as a single lane, but as a multilane highway with occasional detours, a few supplements in the glove compartment, and somebody in the passenger seat saying, “Have you tried stretching?”