Uncharted Paths: The Use of Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (TCAM) among Sub-Saharan Africans living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The appeal of traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine (TACM) is growing among persons living in developed countries. Personal beliefs and traditional values about health and healthcare are deemed significant motivations for the use of TCAM. While existing studies have focused on diverse population groups, including persons of European and Asian descent, TCAM use and behaviour among persons of sub-Saharan African (SSA) descent living in Canada and other developed countries remains unknown. Existing studies on TCAM and healthcare-seeking behaviour of racial or ethnic minorities suggests possible alienation due to sociocultural health beliefs and practices. These studies fail to investigate the role of context in the identity construction and sociocultural belonging and how this ultimately affects the choice of healing practices. Anthias' (2002, 2008, 2012a) asserts that immigrants and their descendants have complex relationships with different locales – country of residence (or naturalised countries) and country of origin. This complex relationship entails social, cultural, symbolic and material ties between homelands and destinations. This research seeks to examine TCAM use among persons of SSA origin living in the GTA and to understand how ethnocultural identity informs the use of TCAM remedies using Anthias’ translocational positionality as a theoretical framework. \n \nThe study uses a sequential mixed-method approach to garner data on sociodemographic characteristics, transnational relationships, health status and health care-seeking behaviours of persons of SSA origin living in the Greater Toronto Area. Lifetime prevalence of TCAM use among respondents of SSA descent is ~57.14% and 12-month prevalence of TCAM use is ~23.81%. About 48.72% of the respondents indicated the TCAM used are of their ethnocultural origin. A sizeable proportion of respondents had unmet TCAM need (~20.88%) and engaged in transnational healthcare-seeking behaviour or medical return (~39.56%). \n \nThe findings of the interview show the meaning associated with ethnocultural identity and the broader contextual factors that influence the utilisation of ethnocultural identity in health promotion or healthcare-seeking. The findings of the interviews challenge the alienation assumption and show the ability of participants to transcend and transition between ethnocultural identities in different contexts.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 it