Health, Wellness and Tourism: healthy tourists, healthy business ...

Purification 11
Application of alternative medicine
Many of the treatments involve procedures which have to be subsumed under the notion
“alternative medicine”, whereby every approach is subsumed here for which a scientific
confirmation of the effectiveness is not documented (in contrast to the so-called “evidencebased
medicine”). These offers can be classified into two categories: 1) treatments following
an approach which would in principle be consistent with a natural science point of view but
without effect control studies acknowledged by the scientific community (such as certain
lymph drainages or detoxifications), and 2) treatments with a background exceeding natural
science approaches, such as traditional Asian concepts involving the diagnosis of energy
balances or similar. In the sample of 134 hotels, 75 (56 %) do not promote any kind of
alternative medicine on the homepage, 17 only type 1), 16 type 2) and 26 hotels both types.
So if type 1) is applied, the probability that also type 2) is applied is doubled (Cramer’s V =
0.432, p < 0.001).
In general, the broader the offer, the more alternative medicine is contained. All Mann &
Whitney-tests comparing the broadness of wellness/beauty offers between hotels applying/not
applying alternative medicine result in p-values smaller than 0.001. As another example, there
is a marked positive correlation (r = 0.345, p < 0.001) between the availability of classic and
Asian massage offers.
However, the presence of alternative medicine is hardly predictable by any other of the
characteristics considered by now, so it seems to be a stand-alone characteristic completely
independent of any other assessed property of the hotels – but for two exceptions: The one is
the price, the more expensive, the more alternative medicine of type 1 (V = 0.325, p = 0.001;
Table 9). As the most striking observation, there is hardly any cheap hotel offering type 1
treatments. Additionally, this only holds for type 1), type 2) is not visibly related to the price
level (V = 0.067, p = 0.75).
Table 9: Price level and type 1-treatments
Type 1
offered
Price
level no yes Total
Economy 21 1 22
Mid- 56 30 86
market
Luxury 9 12 21
Total 86 43 129
The other exception is the presence of a beauty focus. If there is one, this raises the
probability that alternative medicine is applied drastically. This statements holds for both of
its types (Type 1: V = 0.31, p < 0.001, Type 2: V = 0.26, p = 0.002). The presence of a beauty
focus obviously corresponds to less confinement to evidence-based procedures (Table 10).
Table 10: Beauty treatments and alternative medicine
Type 1
Type 2
Beauty offered
offered
treatments no yes Total no yes Total
no 51 10 61 50 11 61