ArticleBMC complementary and alternative medicine2017
How do medical students engaging in elective courses on acupuncture and homeopathy differ from unselected students? A survey.
Article in BMC complementary and alternative medicine, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Health misinformation, digital health literacy, and attitudes toward science among university students: an exploratory cross-sectional survey.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Perspectives on Teaching Acupuncture to Medical Students.Medical acupuncture · 2025Article
- Use of Personality Frameworks in Health Science Education.American journal of pharmaceutical education · 2020Review
- Golden Age of Medicine 2.0: Lifestyle Medicine and Planetary Health Prioritized.Journal of lifestyle medicine · 2019Review
- Bias in clinical trials into the effects of complementary and alternative medicine therapies on hemodialysis patients.Journal of family medicine and primary care · 2019Review
- Preventive Medicine for Person, Place, and Planet: Revisiting the Concept of High-Level Wellness in the Planetary Health Paradigm.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2019Article
- Is use of homeopathy associated with poor prescribing in English primary care? A cross-sectional study.Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundWe 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.
methodsElective 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.
resultsTwo 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).
conclusionsThe 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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.