Lyme disease: knowledge, beliefs, and practices of physicians in a low-endemic area.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To determine physicians' level of awareness and knowledge of Lyme disease (LD) in a low-prevalence area and whether physicians' practices align with current guidelines for treatment of LD. DESIGN: A 23-item questionnaire assessing demographic characteristics, general knowledge about LD, laboratory testing for LD, and responses to 3 clinical scenarios. SETTING: British Columbia (BC). PARTICIPANTS: Pediatricians, FPs, and internal medicine specialists who were licensed to practise in BC. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Knowledge of signs and symptoms of LD, beliefs about risk of LD, attitudes toward LD in patients in their practices, and application of accepted practice guidelines for the treatment of LD in clinical scenarios. RESULTS: Overall, 80.6% of respondents were FPs. Average knowledge score was 72.5% for FPs and 75.0% for other specialists. Most respondents (75.6% of FPs and 71.8% of other specialists) underestimated the occurrence of erythema migrans (EM), and only 26.1% and 28.3%, respectively, knew that EM alone was diagnostic for LD. A total of 30.5% of FPs and 12.1% of other specialists reported having treated a patient for the disease despite not believing that the patient had LD. Of all the respondents, 62.1% knew that LD was a reportable disease in BC. Respondents' reports of risk of LD in their areas were appropriately associated with actual risk based on ecological niche. CONCLUSION: Physicians are knowledgeable about the clinical signs and symptoms of LD and aware of the risk of the disease despite being in a low-endemic area. Physicians in BC are comfortable with treating patients empirically for LD. Education is needed to inform physicians that EM is diagnostic and no laboratory testing is indicated before treatment. Raising awareness among physicians that LD is reportable might improve reporting of future cases.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".