Alternative medicine

These alternative medicine dissertation examples are student-contributed and reflect common research directions across complementary and integrative health. Students typically investigate how non-conventional therapies are used alongside standard care, how people judge safety and effectiveness, and how practitioners, regulators, and health services manage risk.

Many dissertations focus on patient decision-making and lived experience: why people choose acupuncture, herbal medicine, chiropractic, homeopathy, naturopathy, mindfulness-based approaches, or traditional medicine systems, and how expectations, culture, cost, and trust shape those choices. Another frequent theme is evidence and outcomes — for example, how clinical trials and systematic reviews are interpreted, placebo effects and treatment context, and how to evaluate therapies where standard outcome measures may not fit patient goals. Safety and policy angles can include herb–drug interactions, quality control and labelling of supplements, advertising claims, professional regulation, informed consent, and referral or signposting within primary care. Students also explore access and inequality, including whether complementary therapies widen or narrow health gaps depending on who can afford them.

Use these alternative medicine dissertation examples to develop a focused research question and keywords for your literature review, such as complementary therapies, integrative healthcare, patient experience, health beliefs, self-care, safety, regulation, and evidence-based practice.