Although research supporting the efficacy of various complementary therapies is increasing, if hospitals confined themselves to those procedures supported by evidence there wouldn’t be much to offer, says Ian Coulter, a senior health policy analyst at the Rand Corp. (The same could be said of many conventional medical treatments, of course.) So hospitals pick and choose, based on what they judge to be most effective and what they believe patients want.

For their part, hospitals find that patients are pleased to have the options, and that is often reason enough for them to offer the services. The hospital survey found that patient satisfaction was the No. 1 measure used to evaluate the success of a hospital’s complementary and alternative medicine program, cited by 85 percent of respondents. Only 42 percent said they were using health outcomes to measure the success of their programs