Attitudes and Practices of Complementary and Alternative Medicine Among Adolescents in Saudi Arabia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the attitudes and use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) among Saudi Arabian adolescents. A multistage stratified sampling method was used to select 736 adolescents (358 males, 378 females) aged 15-19 years from secondary schools. The study was carried out in Al-Khobar city, Eastern region of Saudi Arabia. The findings revealed that the use of CAM by adolescents in their lifetime ranged from 1.6% for acupuncture to 58.6% for honey treatment, with significant differences between genders, except in the use of dietary supplements, black cumin, and acupuncture therapies. Females were more likely to use CAM for treating abdominal pains, cold and flu, and cough than males (P < 0.000). Family members and friends (67.7%) were the main source of CAM usage, followed by television (10%), and Internet (8%). Religious and medicinal herb healers were the CAM healers most commonly visited by adolescents. Nearly 21-43% of adolescents had positive attitudes toward CAM, with some significant differences between males and females. It can be concluded that CAM is widely used by Saudi adolescents, but caution should be exercised for the safe usage of some CAM treatments. CAM should not be ignored; however there is an urgent need to establish regulations for CAM usage.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".