Differences in healthcare utilisation between users and non-users of homeopathic products in Spain: results from three waves of the National Health Survey (2011-2017)
| Autor: | Alejandro Rodríguez-Caro, Jaime Pinilla |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
Male
Viral Diseases Critical Care and Emergency Medicine Medical Doctors Physiology Serveis sanitaris Health Care Providers Microdata (statistics) Logistic regression Geographical locations Treatment and control groups 0302 clinical medicine Health care Medicine and Health Sciences Medicine Public and Occupational Health Medical Personnel 030212 general & internal medicine Multidisciplinary Homeopathy Middle Aged Vaccination and Immunization Body Fluids 030205 complementary & alternative medicine Europe Vaccination Professions Infectious Diseases Blood Oncology Homeopatia Materia Medica Female Anatomy Vacunes antigripals Research Article Adult medicine.medical_specialty Adolescent Science Immunology MEDLINE 03 medical and health sciences Malignant Tumors Complementary and Alternative Medicine Humans European Union business.industry Cancers and Neoplasms Biology and Life Sciences Patient Acceptance of Health Care Health Surveys Influenza Health Care Spain Family medicine Propensity score matching Population Groupings Preventive Medicine People and places business Delivery of Health Care |
| Zdroj: | PLoS ONE, Vol 14, Iss 5, p e0216707 (2019) PLoS ONE |
| Popis: | To compare the differences in the use of healthcare services: visits to the doctor and hospitalisation, performance of routine tests, and preventive influenza vaccination, between users and non-users of homeopathic products. We used the microdata for adults over 15 years old from three waves of the Spanish National Health Survey, corresponding to the years 2011, 2014 and 2017. We proposed a comparative design of a quasi-experimental type, considering as the treatment group the respondents who said that they had used homeopathic products in the past two weeks; and another group, for control, comprising respondents who said that they had not used this type of products, but only conventional medicines, with observable characteristics similar to those of the treatment group. We used a model for rare events logistics regression (relogit) to estimate the probability of using homeopathy. From the propensity score and a vector of control variables, we used techniques of genetic matching to match individuals from the treatment group with similar individuals belonging to the control group. There are no statistically significant differences between users and non-users of homeopathy in visits to the general practitioner (P>|z| 0.387), to the specialist (P>|z| 0.52), in hospitalisations (P>|z| 0.592) or in the use of emergency services (P>|z| 0.109). Nor were there any statistically significant differences in the performance of routine tests, except for the faecal occult blood test, which is more prevalent in users of homeopathic products. 20.9% of users of homeopathy had done this test compared with 15.3% of non-users (P>|z| 0.022). There are also significant differences in vaccination against influenza with 12.6% of homeopathy users stating that they had been vaccinated in the last influenza campaign, against 21.0% of non-users (P>|z |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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