Complementary and Alternative Medicine: A Pharmacist's Perspective on Patient Needs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is pervasive throughout the Canadian healthcare landscape. The lead paper offers recommendations on research, regulation and funding based on accepting evidence beyond that found through randomized clinical trials. Unfortunately, the efforts that go into policy-making are unlikely to reflect the ever-evolving and plastic nature of CAM. Pharmacists have long been the most easily accessible healthcare professional and a natural bridge between CAM and conventional medicine. The role of CAM, and specifically herbal medications, in conjunction with conventional therapy is a dilemma faced by pharmacists every day. Policy-makers need to be creative in order to collect data on safety first and then efficacy for a public that is already using these services. The quandaries pharmacists face on these issues are a microcosm of what researchers and governments must deal with in creating policies that respect patient autonomy and at the same time protect public safety.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.017 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".