Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to traditional and complementary medicine practice does not make it go away: a qualitative study exploring perceptions and attitudes of stakeholders towards the integration of traditional and complementary medicine into medical school curriculum in Uganda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: A substantial proportion of healthcare professionals have inadequate understanding of traditional and complementary medicine and often consider their use inappropriate. METHODS: We conducted a qualitative study to understand the perceptions and attitudes of medical students, medical school faculty and traditional and complementary medicine practitioners. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were used to collect data. Thematic approach was used in data analysis to identify emerging themes and sub themes. Data analysis was supported with use of Atlas.ti v6.1.1. RESULTS: The majority of participants commended the inclusion of traditional and complementary medicine principles into medical school curricula. The main reasons advanced were that: patients are already using these medicines and doctors need to understand them; doctors would be more accommodating to use and not rebuke patients, thereby minimizing delays in care due to pursuit of alternative therapies; promote patient safety; foster therapeutic alliance and adherence to therapy; uphold patients' right to self-determination; lead to discovery of new drugs from traditional medicines; and set ground for regulation of practices and quality control. However, participants anticipated operational and ethical challenges that include inadequate number of faculty to teach the subject, congested curricula, increased costs in research and development to produce evidence-base data, obstruction by pharmaceutical companies, inaccessibility to and depletion of medicinal plants, and potential conflicts due to diversity in culture and values. A substantial minority of participants thought traditional medicine need not be taught in medical schools because there is lack of scientific evidence on efficacy, safety, and side effects profiles. These shortfalls could make the determination of benefits (beneficence) and harm (maleficence) difficult, as well as compromise the ability of physicians to adequately disclose benefits and harms to patients and family, thereby undermining the process of informed consent and patient autonomy. CONCLUSIONS: Training medical students in principles of traditional and complementary medicine is considered reasonable, feasible, and acceptable; and could lead to improvement in health outcomes. There are anticipated challenges to implementing a hybrid medical school curricula, but these are surmountable and need not delay introducing traditional and complementary medicine principles into medical school curricula in Uganda.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".