A cross-sectional workforce survey of three traditional and complementary medicine professions in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Workforce studies about traditional and complementary medicine (T&CM) occupations in industrialized countries are scant; and, these occupations' position within the broader occupational workforce remains unclear. This study aims to address these gaps using a comparative approach. METHODS: Naturopaths, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) / acupuncture practitioners, and homeopaths in Ontario, Canada were surveyed regarding their demographics, practice characteristics and self-reported income. Results were compared with parallel data from within and outside of Ontario. RESULTS: Study response rate: 23.3% (n = 1205). While predominantly female (57.9%), Ontario's TCM/acupuncture profession was less feminized than the naturopathic (77.1%) and homeopathic (78.3%) groups. Naturopaths were significantly younger than, and reported fewer years of clinical experience than, the other two groups. About half of TCM/acupuncture practitioners, and almost one-third of homeopaths had trained outside of Canada, predominantly in East and South Asia, respectively. More TCM/acupuncture practitioners (58.9%) and homeopaths (57.6%) had multilingual clinical practices than naturopaths (19.1%). Homeopaths worked fewer hours and saw fewer patients per week than the other occupations. Self-reported mean incomes varied across groups, with naturopaths earning more on average ($63,834, SD $57,101) than did TCM/acupuncture practitioners ($45,624, SD $44,081) or homeopaths ($29,230, SD $41,645). Holding other variables constant, internationally-trained practitioners reported earning one-third less than their Canadian-trained counterparts. DISCUSSION & CONCLUSIONS: Study findings echo occupationally-specific data from other industrialized jurisdictions; and, affirm that different T&CM occupations have distinctive demographic and practice characteristics. The demographic makeup of Ontario's TCM/acupuncture and homeopathy occupations suggests a role for these groups in delivering culturally-responsive care within Asian ethnic communities. T&CM practitioner incomes, in particular for internationally-trained practitioners, fell below the provincial population income median, and in many cases below the poverty line. T&CM occupations' relative socio-political marginality may be impacting clinicians' ability to earn a viable living.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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) | 0.005 | 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".