Perception of Conventional Medicine and Herbal Medicine Usage Amongst Diabetic Patients: A Qualitative Study in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The concomitant intake of herbal medicine and conventional medicine amongst patients is steadily increasing worldwide. However, concerns have been raised regarding potential adverse effects and drug interactions when consuming both medications together. Therefore, this work aimed to comprehending the perception of Type 2 Diabetic Mellitus (T2DM) patients on conventional medicine and the manner of its use with herbal medicine in managing diabetes mellitus. METHODS: A qualitative study was conducted among 28 diabetic patients in four government clinics under the jurisdiction of the state of Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia. Purposive sampling was employed to recruit informants who consumed herbal medicine alongside their prescribed conventional medicine. This study employed semi-structured interviews, which were all digitally recorded, transcribed, and analysed thematically. RESULTS: This study found that most of the patients perceived the negative side effects of conventional medicine, which led them to consider incorporating herbal medicine in treating diabetes. Such perception was influenced by the personal experiences of their family members and friends. A majority of the informants utilised herbal medicine as a complementary consumption to conventional medicine as opposed to implementing it as an alternative. However, they would alter the dosage and intake time of conventional medicine for several reasons, such as to complement their herbal medicine intake, being fed-up with conventional medicine, and reduce the risk of its side effects. Lastly, this study revealed that some of the patients noted their intention to discontinue conventional medicine, while some even tried to quit. CONCLUSIONS: A complete understanding of patient’s perceptions regarding conventional medicine and its usage with herbal medicine will aid healthcare providers to deliver education on the importance of conventional medicine usage compliance. Additionally, people should be aware that its combination with herbal medicine when consumed may present adverse effects and subsequently cause serious health problems.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".