Health-seeking behaviours of older black women living with non-communicable diseases in an urban township in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Various studies have shown that non-communicable diseases (NCDs) especially diabetes and hypertension are prevalent among older women living in South African urban areas, placing a heavy burden on the healthcare system. This study aimed to understand the health-seeking behaviour, healthcare practices and prevalence of traditional herbal medicine (THM) use among older women self-reporting NCDs from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology study (PURE). METHOD: A homogenous purposive sampling of PURE participants was used to recruit women who were 50 years or older (n = 250). Descriptive statistics were used to examine the number of NCDs reported by the study sample, health seeking behaviour and practices as well as THM use. Logistic regression was also employed to investigate possible associations between reported conditions and THM use or medical pluralism. RESULTS: Within the study sample, 72 % self-reported an NCD. Of those with self-reported NCDs, 46 % had one, and 54 % had two or more NCDs. Those with NCDs usually visited public clinics (80 %), relied on doctors (90 %) and nurses (85 %) for health information, and mostly used conventional medicine (CM) to manage high blood pressure (81 %). About 30 % of those with NCDs indicated using THM, of whom 29 (53 %) reported practicing medical pluralism. Participants with dental problems (OR: 3.24, 95 % CI: 1.30-8.20), headaches (OR: 2.42, 95 % CI: 1.24-4.94), heart burn (OR: 2.30, 95 % CI: 1.18-4.48) and severe tiredness (OR: 2.05, 95 % CI: 1.08-3.99) were more likely to use THM. Anxiety and allergies increased the likelihood to practise medical pluralism by five and 20 times, respectively. CONCLUSION: Self-reported NCD with co-morbidities was prevalent among the participants in the study. Most of the study participants utilized state-owned clinics and hospitals for the management of their chronic conditions. THM use was not very common. However, among those who used THM, medical pluralism was prevalent. Family history was the most common reason for THM use, with many THM patrons utilizing these for treatment of a health condition. Older black women with anxiety and allergies were more likely to practise medical pluralism.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".