A
Compilation of Chiropractic &
Complementary/Alternative Healthcare Data Contained in Large-Scale
Public-Use Databases
Monica
Smith, DC, PhD; Lynne Carber,
MPM,
PMP
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 Federally
funded large-scale surveys of the American public are routinely
conducted in order to provide reliable, valid, and relevant data
on health and health care. These enormous and costly data
collection efforts could yield a veritable wealth of useful
information on the delivery, utilization, organization, and costs
of chiropractic and complementary/alternative health care.
Yet, the potential for comprehensively examining these sources of
chiropractic and complementary/alternative data, which are
available to researchers as public-use databases, remains largely
unrecognized and untapped.
This
"Chiropractic and Complementary/Alternative Compilation
User's Manual" attempts to facilitate efficient access to
these data and databases for the scientific research community, by
providing a ready index of those databases which contain specific
reference to chiropractic and complementary/alternative health
care. As a means to further maximize the efficiency of the
researcher's efforts, this manual also provides useful information
for expediting the acquisition and initial data management of
these data, as well as offers references and linkages to
additional useful resources.
It is hoped
that this manual opens up research opportunities for previously
unrealized avenues of inquiry, by demonstrating the utility of
public-use large-scale databases for studying aspects of health
care that are of particular interest to the chiropractic and
complementary/alternative scientific community. At the very
least, if this manual serves researchers by reducing some of the
unavoidable drudgery associated with secondary analyses of
existing datasets, then it will have done it's job.
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