Traditional medicine use in surgical patients in a South African tertiary hospital
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The use of traditional medicine (TM) in South Africa is reportedly high. TM use in a South African surgical population presenting for elective surgery is unknown.Aim: The study aim was to survey the perioperative usage of TM in a South African population presenting for elective surgery at a tertiary hospital.Methods: A prospective, contextual and descriptive study was carried out on adults presenting for elective surgery at a tertiary South African hospital.Results: During a 2 month study period 495 patients were interviewed (97% response rate). The mean age was 46.6 years (SD 14.8) with 34% male and 66% female. Patients underwent orthopaedic (42%), general (32%) and gynaecological (26%) surgery. Fifty per cent of the participants were on chronic medication. Thirty-nine per cent of participants reported past TM use and 7% admitted to current TM use. The most common reason for TM was for cleansing purposes (41%) followed by pain (17%). Seven (4%) participants reported adverse events attributed to TM use with 46% unsure whether an adverse event occurred. Factors associated with current TM use were planned surgical procedure (p-value = 0.009), known positive HIV status (p-value = 0.04), and current arthritic medication use (p-value = 0.002).Conclusion: Perioperative TM use is clinically relevant and should be considered in elective surgical patients. However, TM use in the current survey was found to be lower than that quoted in the literature.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".