Introduction: Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has become an important part of healthcare. This study aimed to compare three groups of health care students' attitudes towards, knowledge of, personal use of, and opinions about the integration of CAM into higher education and health care in Hungary. Comparisons were made between those participating and those who did not participate in a Complementary Medicine (CM) course as an optional course during student training. Methods: A survey of the 314 full time students (nurses, midwives and health visitors) were asked to take part in an online survey using a self-complete questionnaire. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results: Students' attitudes towards CAM were positive. The most commonly known alternative methods were massage, relaxation, acupuncture, herbal medicine and meditation. The most commonly personally used and perceived as being effective CAM modalities were herbal medicine, massage and relaxation. Most students believed that the integration of CAM into higher education and into health care is necessary. There were no differences in attitudes towards CAM between students who participated and those who did not participate in the CM course. Participants considered the course to be useful and reported higher knowledge about three CAM modalities and preferred formal education as information sources. Conclusion: Health care students are open to learning CAM. Increasing the number of health care students in the CM courses would result in ensuring that future health care professionals obtain reliable knowledge about CAM practices which may in turn make their work more effective.
Fitness is a central but notoriously vexing concept in evolutionary biology. The propensity interpretation of fitness is often regarded as the least problematic account for fitness. It ties an individual's fitness to a probabilistic capacity to produce offspring. Fitness has a clear causal role in evolutionary dynamics under this account. Nevertheless, the propensity interpretation faces its share of problems. We discuss three of these. We first show that a single scalar value is an incomplete summary of a propensity. Second, we argue that the widespread method of "abstracting away" environmental idiosyncrasies by averaging over reproductive output in different environments is not a valid approach when environmental changes are irreversible. Third, we point out that expanding the range of applicability for fitness measures by averaging over more environments or longer time scales (so as to ensure environmental reversibility) reduces one's ability to distinguish selectively relevant differences among individuals because of mutation and eco-evolutionary feedbacks. This series of problems leads us to conclude that a general value of fitness that is both explanatory and predictive cannot be attained. We advocate for the use of propensity-compatible methods, such as adaptive dynamics, which can accommodate these difficulties.
Showing that the arithmetic mean number of offspring for a trait type often fails to be a predictive measure of fitness was a welcome correction to the philosophical literature on fitness. While the higher mathematical moments (variance, skew, kurtosis, etc.) of a probability-weighted offspring distribution can influence fitness measurement in distinct ways, the geometric mean number of offspring is commonly singled out as the most appropriate measure. For it is well-suited to a compounding (multiplicative) process and is sensitive to variance in offspring number. The geometric mean thus proves to be a predictively efficacious measure of fitness in examples featuring discrete generations and within- or between-generation variance in offspring output. Unfortunately, this advance has subsequently led some to conclude that the arithmetic mean is never (or at best infrequently) a good measure of fitness and that the geometric mean should accordingly be the default measure of fitness. We show not only that the arithmetic mean is a perfectly reasonable measure of fitness so long as one is clear about what it refers to (in particular, when it refers to growth rate), but also that it functions as a more general measure when properly interpreted. It must suffice as a measure of fitness in any case where the geometric mean has been effectively deployed as a measure. We conclude with a discussion about why the mathematical equivalence we highlight cannot be dismissed as merely of mathematical interest.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.