Attitudes Towards Chiropractic: A Repeated Cross-Sectional Survey of Canadian Family Physicians 
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background: Attitudes of Canadian family physicians towards chiropractic are uncertain. Methods: A 50-item survey administered to a ranmdom sample of Canadian family physcians in 2010, and again in 2019, that inquired about demographic variables, knowledge and use of chiropractic. Imbedded in our survey was an 80-point chiropractic attitude questionnaire (CAQ); higher scores indicated more positive attitudes toward chiropractic. Results: Among eligible physicians, 251 of 685 in 2010 (37% response rate) and 162 of 2,429 in 2019 (7% response rate) provided a completed survey. Approximately half of respondents (48%) endorsed a positive impression of chiropractic, with 27% expressing uncertainty and 25% holding negative views. Most respondents (72%) referred patients for chiropractic care, mainly due to patient request or lack of response to medical care. Most physicians believed that chiropractors provide effective therapy for some musculoskeletal complaints (84%) and disagreed that chiropractic care was beneficial for non-musculoskeletal conditions (77%). The majority agreed that chiropractic care was a useful supplement to conventional care (65%) but most respondents (59%) also indicated that practice diversity within the chiropractic profession presented a barrier to interprofessional collaboration. In our adjusted regression model, attitudes towards chiropractic showed trivial improvement from 2010 to 2019 (0.31 points on the CAQ; 95%CI 0.001 to 0.62). More negative attitudes were associated with older age (-1.55 points for each 10-year increment from age 28; 95%CI -2.67 to -0.44), belief that adverse events are common with chiropractic care (-1.41 points; 95% CI -2.59 to -0.23) and reported use of the research literature (-6.04 points; 95% CI -8.47 to -3.61) or medical school (-5.03 points; 95% CI = -7.89 to -2.18) as a source of knowledge on chiropractic. More positive attitudes were associated with endorsing a relationship with a specific chiropractor (5.24 points; 95% CI 2.85 to 7.64), family and friends (4.06 points; 95% CI 1.53 to 6.60), or personal treatment experience (4.63 points; 95% CI 2.14 to 7.11) as sources of information regarding chiropractic.Conclusions: Although generally positive, Canadian family physicians’ attitudes towards chiropractic are diverse, and most physicians acknowledge that practice diversity within the chiropractic profession presents a barrier to interprofessional collaboration.
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".