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- Title
How do medical students engaging in elective courses on acupuncture and homeopathy differ from unselected students? A survey.
- Authors
Jocham, Alexandra; Kriston, Levente; Berberat, Pascal O.; Schneider, Antonius; Linde, Klaus
- Abstract
Background: We aimed to investigate whether students at German medical schools participating in elective courses on acupuncture and homeopathy differ from an unselected group of students regarding attitudes and personality traits. Methods: Elective courses on acupuncture and homeopathy in the academic half-year 2013/14 all over Germany were identified and participants invited to fill in a questionnaire including nineteen questions on attitudes towards Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), orientation towards science, care and status orientation, and a short validated instrument (Big-Five-Inventory-10) to measure personality traits (extraversion, neuroticism, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness). Participants of a mandatory family medicine course at one university served as unselected control group. Results: Two hundred twenty and 113 students from elective courses on acupuncture and homeopathy, respectively, and 315 control students participated (response rate 93%). Students participating in elective courses had much more positive attitudes towards CAM, somewhat lower science and status orientation, and somewhat higher care orientation than control group students (all p-values for three-group comparisons < 0.001). There were no differences between the three groups regarding personality traits with the exception of lower values for agreeableness in controls (p=0.009). Conclusions: The findings of this study show that attitudes of students participating in elective courses on acupuncture or homeopathy at German medical schools differ to a considerable degree from the attitudes of unselected students.
- Subjects
GERMANY; ACUPUNCTURE; ALTERNATIVE medicine; ANALYSIS of variance; ATTITUDE (Psychology); CHI-squared test; CURRICULUM; FISHER exact test; HOMEOPATHY; MEDICAL schools; MEDICAL personnel; MEDICAL students; MEDICINE; QUESTIONNAIRES; RESEARCH; SURVEYS; T-test (Statistics); QUANTITATIVE research; CROSS-sectional method; DATA analysis software; MANN Whitney U Test; KRUSKAL-Wallis Test
- Publication
BMC Complementary & Alternative Medicine, 2017, Vol 17, p1
- ISSN
1472-6882
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1186/s12906-017-1653-z