Levels of Commitment: Exploring Complementary Therapy Use by Women with Breast Cancer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Previous research on complementary therapy use in populations of patients with breast cancer has failed to differentiate among the different types of therapies and utilization patterns, resulting in wide discrepancies in prevalence rates. The purpose of this study was to develop more refined and rigorous estimates of the prevalence of complementary therapy use in women with breast cancer and their level of commitment to complementary therapy. DESIGN AND SAMPLE/SETTING: Using a cross-sectional, retrospective survey design, a random sample of 334 women with breast cancer was drawn from a Canadian provincial cancer registry. Using an intensive therapy inventory, women were asked to indicate the therapies and practices they had used since cancer diagnosis, frequency of use, amount of effort associated with using each therapy, and financial cost of therapy use. RESULTS: A substantial proportion of women with breast cancer were found to be using complementary therapies, with between 19.5% (most conservative estimate) and 79.9% (liberal estimate) of the women reporting the use of at least one complementary therapy following diagnosis. While the majority of therapies were used on a daily basis, a minimal amount of effort and finances was expended on complementary therapy use. Using two-way cluster analysis, two homogenous groups of complementary therapy users were identified based on level of commitment to complementary therapy use. Women with a low commitment to complementary therapy use comprised 73.9% of the sample and were more likely to be older and report less education than women with a moderate-to-high commitment to complementary therapy use. CONCLUSIONS: The use of complementary therapies by women with breast cancer warrants more precise measurement to accurately capture the types of complementary therapies used and the level of commitment to complementary therapy use. The findings of this study point to the value of the concept of commitment in identifying individuals willing to commit substantial time, energy and financial resources to complementary therapy use.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".