Why Are Complementary and Alternative Medicines Becoming Significant Again?
With the increasingly stressful lifestyle and the high expectations people have of themselves and those others have from them, people are suffering from a number of issues, such as hypertension, anxiety and depression, insomnia, psychosomatic pain, and obesity. As per the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2016, 1.9 billion people across the globe were overweight, among whom 650 million were obese. Moreover, almost 4 million die each year as a direct result of being grossly overweight.
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This is a key reason P&S Intelligence believes will propel the complementary and alternative medicines market size from $192.0 billion in 2018 to $271.8 billion by 2024, at a 6.0% CAGR during 2019–2024. These are the traditional medicines that have been known since ancient times, but are said to lack scientific evidence of their efficacy. Although allopathic drugs are easily available to treat all kinds of diseases, physiological or psychological, they have an array of side-effects and sometimes end up causing more harm than benefit.
Among these, nature-based medicines, including homeopathy, mud therapy, and Ayurveda, have the largest number of followers. Nature-based medicines are cheaper than those made from chemicals. Moreover, homeopathy has been popular for a long time, with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) estimating the number of people in the U.S. and globally who use homeopathic medicines at 6 million and 200 million, respectively. Similarly, as per an article in the Lancet, 100 million, or 10% of the people in India, only consume homeopathic medicines.
Anxiety and depression have more to do with the thinking than anything else. Therefore, practices such as regular exercise, controlled breathing, and meditation are commonly suggested to expel negative thoughts from the mind and experience positivity. Therefore, people are rapidly signing up for therapy classes at meditation and yoga centers, ashrams, and even local parks. For instance, in India, elderly people can be regularly seen in local parks practicing yoga and forced laughter. Even scientifically, laughter is known to stimulate the functioning of many organs, activate stress response, improve immunity, and relieve pain.
Hence, with more people suffering from lifestyle-associated diseases, the demand for complementary and alternative medicines will rise.