and Other Therapies for Symptoms Among Older Adults: Study Design and Illustrative Results

Objectives: This article describes research designed to specify comple-mentary therapies used among older adults by obtaining daily use data and the specific purposes for use. Design: Two hundred African American and White participants completed a baseline interview and up to six sets of three daily-diary interviews at monthly intervals. Results: Participants pro-vided retrospective information on complementary therapy use and infor-mation on the use of therapies for specific symptoms experienced across 3,070 person days. Retrospective information indicated that most partici-pants used complementary therapies (e.g., 85.0 % used home remedies in the at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016jah.sagepub.comDownloaded from 2 Journal of Aging and Health XX(X) past year). The use of complementary or other therapies and the number of days the therapies were used varied for specific symptoms. For example, home remedies were used on 86 (9.1%) of the 944 person days for which joint pain was reported. Discussion: The daily-diary design provides detailed information for delineating how elders include complementary and other therapies in their health self-management