Pediatric oncologists' perspectives on the use of complementary medicine in pediatric cancer patients in Switzerland: A national survey‐based cross‐sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: There is a widespread use of complementary therapies among pediatric cancer patients. Previous studies provided evidence that communication between pediatric oncologists (POs) and patients/families about the use of these therapies is often incomplete. Furthermore, nationwide studies on this topic are rare. AIMS: We assessed POs' perspectives on the use of complementary medicine (CM) in Switzerland, on the basis of an edited survey previously used in a nationwide study. METHODS AND RESULTS: A link to an online survey was sent by e-mail to each of the fifty-two eligible pediatric oncologists in all nine Swiss Pediatric Oncology Group (SPOG) centers. Eligible respondents were board-certified (Switzerland or abroad) POs currently working at a SPOG center. The survey was available for a total period of 2 months. We received 29 filled questionnaires (overall response rate: 56%). Most POs (59%) indicated that they ask more than 50% of their patients about CM use. Frequent reasons for not asking about the use of CM were i) forgetting to ask (55%), ii) lack of knowledge on the subject (31%), and iii) lack of time (24%). More than every second PO (55%) reported having a lack of knowledge on the subject. A majority of POs (66% to 76%) indicated interest in learning more about specific CM topics (cannabinoids, hypnosis and relaxation, music therapy, herbal medicine, acupuncture, meditation, and yoga). More information and specific training opportunities on the use of CM was deemed important by 76% to 97% of POs. CONCLUSION: POs working in Switzerland identify complementary therapies as an important subject. Swiss POs are willing to acquire more knowledge on CM. More training seems to be necessary in order to increase awareness about the topic, to enhance communication about complementary therapies and thus to improve patient care.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 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".