Traditional and Complementary Medicines (T&CM) usage amongst patients attending Hospital Queen Elizabeth, Kota Kinabalu

Traditional and Complementary Medicines (T&CM) has made a significant contribution to the health care of the Malaysian community. It continues to be used by our community to maintain health and for the treatment of disease. We carried out our research at Hospital Queen Elizabeth (HQE), Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. The study focused on the percentage of patients who attended HQE that takes T&CM alongside with Conventional Medicines from September to December 2012. The population of patients (out-patient and in-patient) attended HQE from January 2012 to July 2012 is 151898 patients. Therefore, based on our sample calculation, our sample distribution for this research will be 384 patients, which were randomly selected from the outpatient pharmacy (OPP) department and inpatient pharmacy (IPP) department. Hence, we obtained the result by randomly distributed our questionnaire to the patients. From our observation, the percentage of the patient using T&CM with Conventional Medicines is higher as we expected which is 79.43%. Moreover, most of them were also aware of the possible interaction(s) between prescribed medicines and traditional medicines and the importance of the registration of medicines by Ministry Of Health (MOH). Besides that, patients were also aware of other alternative to improve health and to avoid disease by taking neither T&CM nor Conventional Medicines. In conclusion, scientific researches on some T&CM are still lacking and should be broaden to prove the efficacy and safety use of T&CM.