Julie,
I'm not familiar with Social Explorer. I checked out your link and I'm sure it's a fine solution. However... Whenever you perform analysis of data for the purpose of answering a specific question, it's important to determine the scale at which you need your answer. For example, if your alternative medicine question is meant to be answered at the neighborhood level then the data you use should support that analysis. i.e. you might want a few hundred points of information (or more!) across the area of the study. Just be sure to examine your data prior to developing an approach.
The folks at ESRI can be very helpful with these questions. To me, even more than a platform, they are also extremely good providers of data. Their Business Analyst and Community Analyst tools are flush with enough demographic information to complete most analytical tasks. However, if there's something you're looking for that they don't have, they're always willing to track it down for you too. I trust them as a data provider and rarely have to question to validity of the information I get from them.
Hope this helps.
