Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada, there is a growing interest in regulating the practices of acupuncture and Chinese herbology under the banner of ‘Traditional Chinese Medicine’ (TCM). However, the origins and definition of TCM are unclear and therefore disputed. While TCM is often used as an umbrella term to represent Chinese medical traditions that span millennia, numerous academics consider TCM to be a modern construct that has departed from the foundational roots of Chinese medicine. To better understand TCM and its implications for the profession, our study investigates: 1) historical precedents leading up to the formal creation of TCM; 2) characteristics and defining features of TCM; and 3) how this relates to education, practice and regulation of the profession in Canada. A mixed-methods study design was employed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore perceptions of individuals who contributed to mediums that discussed the formation of TCM or traditions that exist outside of TCM. In addition, an anonymous web-based survey was sent to TCM-related professional organizations, who were asked to distribute the survey to their members to capture the views of persons practicing within TCM-related health professions in Canada. Due to a lack of participation from the organizations, no survey data was collected. Interviews revealed that TCM is a product of the standardization and simplification of Chinese medicine during the 1950’s and 60’s in China to meet healthcare needs at the time. Currently in Canada, there appears to be a lack of awareness that the establishment of TCM is not a comprehensive representation of Chinese medical traditions, and that many aspects of it may not be suited to the healthcare landscape of modern-day Canada. There is a need for more discussion surrounding the identity of this new profession.
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 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 | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".