Use of complementary and alternative medicine in a pediatric population in southern Turkey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in children is becoming increasingly acceptable and popular. The aim of this questionnaire-based study was to determine the prevalence, patterns of use, types, perceived effectiveness and associated factors of CAM in children. METHODS: Parents of children (n= 268) who attended the Pediatric Outpatient Department of the Faculty of Medicine at Gaziantep University in June and July 2008 were asked to complete a questionnaire. RESULTS: The prevalence of CAM use, at least once in the previous year, was 58.6%. The most commonly used CAM modality was herbal preparations (82.7%), which were used to treat cough (42.0%), diarrhea (30.0%) and gas (colic) pains (34.4%). These products were recommended by the respondents' mother/mother-in-law (52.5%), neighbors (20.0%), friends (14.7%) and doctors (12.8%). Only 31.6% (61) of these parents informed their doctor about their use of CAM to treat their children. Thirty-eight percent (n=102) of the participants stated that they preferred to use CAM modalities rather than referring to a doctor when their child was sick. While most of the families (57.7 %) stated that the method they used was "slightly" useful, 18.6% of them stated the method to be "fairly" useful. The parental use of CAM and the educational level of the parents were among the factors of affecting the use of CAM in children. No correlation was found between the use of CAM and the sex, social security status, income level and other sociodemographic properties of the respondents. CONCLUSION: This study showed that a great majority of parents of children in this population used CAM modalities and that herbal products were preferred. Most parents did not inform their physicians of their use of CAM. In the light of these findings, pediatricians should be prepared to discuss alternative therapies with parents, since talking about CAM may be helpful in minimizing associated risks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".