Complementary and alternative medicine use by Canadian university students.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Studies investigating Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) prevalence are outdated and are generalized across different demographic groups due to their national scope. Determining trends among specific populations is necessary to gain insight into the growing popularity of CAM. OBJECTIVES: To determine the prevalence and factors associated with CAM use among Canadian university undergraduate students and to determine student views regarding CAM research, education and policy-making decisions. METHODS: Two arbitrarily selected undergraduate student classes at Queen's University were surveyed for this cross-sectional descriptive study. Information was provided by 128 respondents via questionnaire (75% response rate) on key demographics, CAM use and satisfaction with mainstream Canadian healthcare. Upon completion of the survey, voluntary participation was requested for the interview portion resulting in 7 semi-structured qualitative interviews. RESULTS: Of the 128 participants, 90 (70%) claimed to be users of at least one CAM modality. Female gender was strongly associated with CAM use (p<0.001). Other characteristics that may be correlated include being enrolled in a health-related academic program, being dissatisfied with certain aspects of the healthcare system and having parents who use CAM. The majority of respondents desired more research and education on CAM and more collaboration between the two healthcare streams. CONCLUSIONS: Canadian university undergraduate students are active CAM users and interest in CAM is high among this population. Further investigation is required to ensure that students are using CAM safely and appropriately.
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 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) | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".