While intuition plays a role in clinical decision making within conventional medicine, little is understood about its use in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). The aim of this qualitative study was to investigate intuition from the perspective of homeopathic practitioners; its' manifestation, how it was recognized, its origins and when it was used within daily clinical practice. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with clinically experienced non-National Health Service (NHS) UK homeopathic practitioners. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to analyze the data. Homeopaths reported many similarities with conventional medical practitioner regarding the nature, perceived origin and manifestation of their intuitions in clinical practice. Intuition was used in two key aspects of the consultation: (i) to enhance the practitioner-patient relationship, these were generally trusted; and (ii) intuitions relating to the prescribing decision. Homeopaths were cautious about these latter intuitions, testing any intuitive thoughts through deductive reasoning before accepting them. Their reluctance is not surprising given the consequences for patient care, but we propose this also reflects homeopaths' sensitivity to the academic and medical mistrust of both homeopathy and intuition. This study is the first to explore the use of intuition in decision making in any form of complementary medicine. The similarities with conventional practitioners may provide confidence in validating intuition as a legitimate part of the decision making process for these specific practitioners. Further work is needed to elucidate if these findings reflect intuitive use in clinical practice of other CAM practitioners in both private and NHS (i.e., time limited) settings.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. 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 12 December 2021.
All research outputs
#22,980,811
of 34,410,315 outputs
Outputs from Evidence-based Complementary & Alternative Medicine (eCAM)
#3,598
of 9,645 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#213,684
of 255,850 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Evidence-based Complementary & Alternative Medicine (eCAM)
#53
of 68 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,410,315 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 32nd percentile – i.e., 32% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 9,645 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 9.5. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 61% of its peers.
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