The diffusion of alternative health care: a Canadian case study of chiropractic and naturopathic practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Due to the dominance of the biomedical model in North America, other types of health care, such as the various forms of alternative health practices, are viewed as ancillary. Alternative health care practices, such as chiropractic and naturopathy are a growing phenomenon which are becoming increasingly available and accessible throughout North America, due to their expanding acceptance and use. The spatial growth of chiropractic and naturopathic practitioners in two Canadian provinces is described for the period between 1984 and 1993. This spatial description, framed within Brown's innovation diffusion model, provides insight into the geographical dimensions of these growing phenomena. In addition to exhibiting contagious diffusion, both practitioner groups exhibit the same hierarchical pattern that has been found with alternative health care practitioners in the United States. The many supply and demand factors influencing the diffusion of these two alternative health care practices are discussed in light of the forms of diffusion found. As alternative health care is under‐researched by geographers, this research is a preliminary contribution, providing an initial spatial understanding of its growing presence. La prépondérance du modéle biomédical américain maintient le statut ancillaire des formes de soins de santé alternatives. Les pratiques de soins de santé alternatives, telles que la chiropractie et la naturopathie, sont des phénoménes de plus en plus répandus et dont la disponibilité et l'accessibilité augmentent en Amérique du Nord en raison du niveau croissant de leur acceptation et utilisation par le public. Il sera question ici de l'expansion géographique des praticiens en chiropractie et en naturopathie dans deux provinces canadiennes entre 1984 et 1993. Cette analyse géographique, qui s'appuie sur le modele de diffusion des innovations de Brown, explique les dimensions géographiques de ces phénoménes en pleine croissance. En plus de présenter une diffusion de type contagieuse, les deux groupes de praticiens présentent la même forme hiérarchique de diffusion que celle observée aux États‐Unis. Les nombreux facteurs d'offre et de demande qui affectent la diffusion de ces deux pratiques de soins de santé alternatives sont examinés. Puisque l'étude des soins de santé alternatifs est encore limitée en géographie, cette recherche jette les premiers jalons d'une meilleure compréhension géographie de ce phénoméne en croissance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".