Vaccination is one of the most significant and successful public health measures of recent times. Whilst the use of complementary medicine (CM) continues to grow, it has been suggested that CM practitioners hold anti-vaccination views. The objective of this critical review is to examine the evidence base in relation to CM practitioner attitudes to childhood vaccination alongside attitudes to vaccination among parents who visit CM practitioners and/or use CM products.
A database search was conducted in MEDLINE, PubMed, CINAHL, EMBASE and AMED for research articles published between January 2000 and September 2015 that evaluated either CM practitioner or CM user attitudes and intention towards childhood vaccination.
A total of 23 articles were found that detailed the attitudes of CM practitioners to vaccination. A further 16 papers examined the association between the use of CM products and visits to CM practitioners, and immunisation. The interface between CM and vaccination is complex, multi-factorial and often highly individualised. The articles suggest that there is no default position on immunisation by CM practitioners or parents who use CM themselves, or for their children. Although CM use does seem positively associated with lower vaccination uptake, this may be confounded by other factors associated with CM use (such as higher income, higher education or distrust of the medical system), and may not necessarily indicate independent or predictive relationships.
Although anti-vaccination sentiment is significant amongst some CM practitioners, this review uncovers a more nuanced picture, and one that may be more agreeable to public health values than formerly assumed.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 47. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 04 September 2024.
All research outputs
#1,077,699
of 32,332,113 outputs
Outputs from Vaccine
#962
of 19,240 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#14,591
of 326,538 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Vaccine
#18
of 183 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 32,332,113 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 96th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 19,240 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 18.9. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 94% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 326,538 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 95% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 183 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 90% of its contemporaries.
