| Abstract: | Complementary and alternative medical approaches such as chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, holistic, and naturopathic therapies act as complements to, and in some cases replacements for, conventional medical techniques. The growing acceptance of the benefits of "traditional" medicine in the Canadian province of Ontario continues to provide complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners with business opportunities, but to date little attention has been directed toward the spatial patterns exhibited by these operations. A province-wide database of 4,599 records, containing addresses and selected characteristics (e.g., sales, employment) of CAM offices, is utilized to describe the geographic pattern across Ontario. An additional database allows for the assessment of four intermediate-sized census metropolitan areas (CMAs) in Ontario (Kingston, Guelph, Thunder Bay, and Greater Sudbury), and it is determined (using a general nearest neighbor analysis and a nearest neighbor hierarchical clustering procedure) that CAM offices are significantly clustered in specific portions of each CMA. The results from a survey administered to CAM practitioners suggests that the benefits of urbanization economies are biasing location decisions within these CMAs, and that localization economies advantages appear to be influencing complementary and alternative healthcare specialists to share offices. |
